Phyllis Hollingsworth, 90: Reminiscing on a life of hard work and joy

Now that Phyllis Fox Evans Hollingsworth is several months into her 91st year, she's starting to slow down a bit after a lifetime of hard work and creativity. 

Her family says she still accomplishes more than most women half her age, but they're thankful that, a few short years ago, she at least stopped climbing onto the roof of her house to put up her annual grand display of Christmas decorations.

"People will be disappointed if I don't put out the lights," she argued.

"People will understand that an 80-something great-grandma shouldn't be climbing ladders and pulling Santa's sleigh out of the storage shed," her family argued back. 

For more than 30 years, Phyllis carefully arranged the Christmas-decoration extravaganza around her home on Highway 181 near the Gainesville city limits as an annual tribute to her son Layne, who died in December 1985 at age 22. 

The next year after his death, she began the tradition of transforming her house and yard into what her family jokingly called the "Griswold family Christmas display," complete with thousands of twinkling lights and dozens of colorful motifs and characters. The nickname came from the zany 1980s movie "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation," in which comedian Chevy Chase goes all out to give his family a Christmas display like none other. Phyllis started her displays each year right after Thanksgiving; it usually took her a week of hard work to get everything just the way she wanted it. 

She might have given in to sorrow at that hard time of year, remembering Layne's death. She could have closed herself off in a dark, lonely house. But that isn't Phyllis' way. Instead, each evening during those many Christmas seasons, when the twinkling lights came on, she was choosing to share joy with passersby instead of sorrow. 

You could say that hard work and joy have been Phyllis' "default settings" throughout her life, her superpowers in celebrating the good times and surviving the heartbreaking losses she and her family have shared through the years.

Recently she remembered those times as she sat in her immaculate home with the two daughters she raised to be as hard-working and joyful as she is. Glenda Evans Douglas and Rhonda Evans Suter reminisced along with her. 

Hard work and happiness

Phyllis was born March 12, 1934, on a 160-acre Pottersville farm owned by her parents, the late Everett and Wretha Spencer Fox. Phyllis was the fourth of their seven children. One of their daughters, Lillian Ruth, died at age 3.

The house had two big rooms and a kitchen. Each of the front rooms had an outside door, "and in the summertime, air would blow straight through," Phyllis remembered. 

"They were very poor, but there was always lots of food," Glenda said. "They had a big garden, and they raised pigs."

"I remember one time Dad killed six or seven hogs at one time," Phyllis remembered. "He hung the hams in the smokehouse. You talk about good!"

The family also made its own lye soap at hog-butchering time.

Wretha and the kids worked in the garden, and throughout the summer they canned what they grew. "Hundreds of jars," Glenda said.

They stored the canned goods in a "hot house," a structure with double walls, inner and outer. The gap between the walls was filled with sawdust, "and that kept everything cool in the summer and warm in the winter – kept it from freezing," Phyllis said.

They also harvested what nature provided, including gallons of blackberries, "along with all the ticks and chiggers," she said.

Phyllis was 10 when she started helping with the milking. They milked enough cows to provide for their big family, plus more to sell. "We sold the milk," she said. "The milk truck came by and picked it up in the cream cans."

The big family gathered around one long kitchen table to share the meals Wretha prepared on a wood-burning cookstove. The old stove was still in use when Glenda and Rhonda came along in the 1950s. "That stove made the best bread," Rhonda said.

Phyllis remembers eating the family's home-smoked ham and bacon at some meals, plus "headcheese and mincemeat pie" at others. 

Water for the household came from an outside pump that stood by the kitchen door. The house had no electricity until around 1960. Coal-oil lamps provided what light there was.  "They were the last to get electricity in Howell County," Glenda said.

An ice box kept the milk cold. Phyllis remembers, in the 1950s, going with her dad to West Plains and buying a large, solid block of ice that was lifted into the top of the ice box to provide old-time refrigeration.

A quilt frame was suspended from the ceiling above the table – raised when the family ate, lowered when Wretha was quilting. 

Phyllis and her five siblings slept on featherbeds in the home’s single bedroom.

“How many kids slept in a bed?” she is asked.

“All that could get in!” she answers, laughing.

“Did the kids work?”

“Did we ever!” Phyllis replies. “All us kids had chores. I remember gathering eggs when I was little. Dad was one who never let anyone lay in bed too long.”

Phyllis walked the mile-long path through the woods with her brothers and sister to attend the one-room Crider school. From there she attended Bakersfield High School, but she dropped out at age 16, when she fell in love. 

A happy surprise in the outhouse

It happened at a “play party” hosted by a friend in the area. “We’d play these games,” Phyllis said. “You’d get in a circle and have a partner, and you’d go around . . .”

Phyllis was spending the night with her girlfriend, Vivian Hensley, and they went to the play party together. 

Tall (6’4”), dark and handsome Burl Evans, a Gainesville High School graduate, also attended the play party that night, accompanied by his first cousin, Ansel Evans. Phyllis noticed Burl right away and found out he “had a job and this big truck that he hauled lumber and logs on,” she said. “I thought he was really cool.” 

The feeling was apparently mutual. Phyllis heard later that Burl told someone that night he was “taking the prettiest girl there home,” nodding toward Phyllis.

And that’s what happened. After the party, Burl and Ansel took Phyllis and Vivian back to Vivian’s house. Long story short: “We married both of them,” Phyllis said.

She was 16; he was 22. 

After their Nov. 18, 1950, wedding, the newlyweds lived with Burl’s parents, General and Gladys Evans, in their two-bedroom home between Elijah and Tecumseh. Burl was the oldest of the Evanses’ six children. He and his dad cut and hauled logs for the sawmill run by Ansel and his dad, Lilburn Evans.

Later, Phyllis and Burl moved into a home on the Evans property that Burl’s aunt, Chloe Evans James, and her husband, Othal, had made out of “half of the chicken house” after they “fixed it up,” Phyllis said.  

Phyllis’ new home felt a lot like the home where she’d grown up. Gladys Evans “had a huge garden, and they also killed chickens and hogs,” she said. Phyllis helped with all the chores, including the gardening and canning, until Sept. 10, 1951, when she took an additional job: motherhood.

Their daughter Glenda Jean was born in John B. Stoll’s small hospital in West Plains.

Soon after that, Phyllis and Burl moved into a house down the road from Burl’s parents’ home. But Phyllis still shared a garden with Gladys. 

Their “new” house had a living room, kitchen and two bedrooms, but it still lacked electricity or indoor running water. 

In fact, water had to be carried from the “running water spring” at the foot of the hill below the house. “I carried that water up the hill in a two-and-a-half-gallon bucket,” Phyllis said. “I carried all the water we used for laundry or baths or drinking. That’s why I’m still so strong today.” 

And for watering the large garden.

A second daughter, Rhonda, was born in 1955 back in Dr. Stoll’s West Plains hospital. One of the stories Phyllis’ daughters love to share these days is the way she described the family’s rides in Burl’s black 1950 Ford sedan down the area’s narrow dirt roads.

“When I think of that car, I think about Mom saying, ‘When we went to Grandma Fox’s, Glenda would be standing in the backseat, her blonde curls bouncing, with the windows down and dirt rolling around her so bad we could hardly see her back there,” Rhonda said, laughing.

“Dad was probably going 90 miles per hour,” Glenda added, “He was always as fast as he was funny.”

Another sweet memory the daughters recall is the time their parents happily told the girls they had a surprise for them. “It was a little celebration. Dad had built a new outhouse, and he didn’t tell us, but he had made a smaller hole just for us in between the two bigger holes,” Rhonda said. 

“We were so excited,” said Glenda. “It had a step for us and everything.”

Glenda started first grade at the Mineral Point one-room school while they lived in that house between Tecumseh and Elijah. 

Then Burl and Phyllis moved their family to West Plains, where Burl worked in the timber for the company then called White Oak Flooring. But soon the family moved again, when the company transferred him to Vienna, Missouri, to manage a lumber mill there.

A new enterprise –  and a new house

 A few months later, around 1960 or 61, they were back in Ozark County, living in a rented house at Lilly Ridge while Burl and his brother, J.R., started a new enterprise, Ozark Forest Charcoal, a couple of miles away northeast of the Gainesville Airport.

The venture involved burning, in large, poured-concrete kilns, long slabs of wood cut from trees harvested in area forests. The fires inside the kilns had to be carefully monitored and controlled to produce the large chunks of charcoal that would be trucked to Belle, Missouri, or Burnside, Kentucky, to be turned into briquets sold under the Kingsford Charcoal brand.

The Evans brothers’ company was the first project supported by the newly formed Gainesville Industrial Corporation, said Glenda, who was 10 and in fourth grade at that time.

Every day, as Burl drove to work at the charcoal kilns, he passed a house on what is now Highway 181 that was being built by the late Elvis Hannaford and his son Jerry. He liked what he saw. “I’m gonna buy that house,” he told a very surprised Phyllis one day.

And that’s what they did, moving into their new home – the house where Phyllis still lives – in 1961. 

A son, Layne, was born in 1963. Glenda, then 12, and Rhonda, 8, remember fighting over who got to hold their infant brother. “It was like one of my dolls had come to life,” Rhonda remembered.

The charcoal business was successful, but it was hard work. “Dad would come in so black. The only thing not black was the whites of his eyes,” Glenda said. 

Burl would sometimes take his family to the kilns at night to check on the fires, either by climbing a ladder and looking through a vent, or by peeking into one of the ground vents.

Burl taught his daughters how to watch the charcoal’s progress. “I remember that it was okay if the color was red, and if it was not red, it wasn’t OK,” Rhonda said. 

“Dad would tell me the colors and say whether it was bright red or orange,” Glenda added. When the girls learned to drive, they sometimes went on their own to the kilns at night to check the charcoal’s progress.

Eventually Burl bought out his brother, J.R., and became the sole owner of the kilns.

Changes, challenges and loss

Time passed. The Evans kids moved through the grades in the Gainesville schools. The kilns continued to turn out charcoal. But Phyllis and Burl’s marriage failed, and in 1975, they divorced. 

Glenda graduated from high school in 1969 and headed to the University of Missouri in Columbia. But her time there was short. While she was back home at Phyllis’ house for Thanksgiving break, Burl suffered a massive heart attack. He called Glenda from his house at Lilly Ridge and asked her to take him to Dr. Jacob Obenaur’s office in Gainesville. When Dr. Obenaur wanted to call an ambulance to take Burl to the hospital in Mountain Home, Arkansas, Burl stopped him. “She can drive me,” he said, motioning toward Glenda. 

“So I drove him down there, scared to death,” Glenda said. “We had no oxygen, no care of any kind, just me trying to get him there as fast as I could.”

Burl was hospitalized a month. 

Glenda withdrew from her classes at Mizzou and came home to care for her dad. Burl eventually recovered enough to return to work at the charcoal kilns.

The next year, in November 1970, Glenda married her high school sweetheart, Allen Douglas, and joined him back in Columbia, where he was attending the university.

Rhonda graduated from GHS in May 1973, and a few weeks later, in July, she married Mark Suter at Gainesville’s First Baptist Church.

Phyllis had worked at the MarBax shirt factory during some of her kids’ childhood. And she took a cake-decorating class, hoping to earn a little extra money here and there. In 1973, she was working part-time as an assistant in the Gainesville license office and part-time at Bushong’s Grocery while also parenting 10-year-old Layne.

 Despite the two jobs, she found time to make Rhonda’s wedding dress, sewing at night after work and on weekends. She also made the dresses for all nine of Rhonda’s attendants. And she made her own dress for the wedding. Plus, she also baked and decorated the couple’s beautiful, tiered wedding cake and handmade the mints. 

She had learned to sew as a child and had sewn clothes for her children during their growing-up years – and for her girls’ Barbies. “Even with fur collars,” Glenda said.  

“Quite a woman, ain’t I?” Phyllis joked with a wide smile, hearing her daughters list her many accomplishments.

In addition to her sewing and cake-decorating skills, Phyllis also enjoyed artistic painting. She tweaked her natural talent by taking lessons with Jeanie Cornetti, and now her colorful paintings are displayed throughout her house. Some of her first pictures depicted the homes where she had grown up. 

Her talents also include quilting and embroidery. Plus, she has crocheted several tablecloths and afghans. 

Also in 1973, Glenda and Allen moved home from Columbia, and Allen joined Burl at the charcoal kilns and took over most of the business management as Burl’s health remained fragile. Allen and Glenda’s son Jeff was born in 1974. Sadly, just one year later, in 1975, Burl died of congestive heart failure.   

Another time of hard work

and happiness

Rhonda and Mark lived in Gainesville awhile then moved to Midland, Texas, where Mark worked in the oilfields. Their son John was born in 1974. They came back to Missouri in 1975, the same year Burl died, and worked at various jobs until one day, Rhonda looked out the window and saw a big semi pulling into the driveway. With Mark in the passenger seat, his dad, Leo Suter, hollered out the window to Rhonda, “I bought us a truck!” 

While Mark and his dad became over-the-road truckers, Rhonda worked at various jobs. Earlier, she had been employed at what is now the Baxter International manufacturing plant in Mountain Home, Arkansas – known locally as “the Lab.” Phyllis started working there during that time too; she would continue at the Lab for 27 years, working third shift and retiring as an assistant supervisor around 2000.

During many of those years, she “hauled riders” with her on the daily, 45-mile round-trip commute. 

“She was a fast driver, too,” noted Glenda. 

“Yes, sometimes, heading down the hill toward Pigeon Creek, I’d say, ‘Girls, you better hang on ‘cause we ain’t slowin’ down for the curves,’” Phyllis added. “But in all those years, and I never had a ticket or a fender-bender.” 

Rhonda and Mark’s second son, Seth, was born in 1979. She stayed home with her two boys briefly – until Mark was temporarily unable to work after being injured in an accident. Then Rhonda went back to work outside the home – first as an assistant to pharmacist Sandy Baker in her drug store on the east side of the Gainesville square. Then, in 1981, she became the receptionist at the Ozark County Health Department, which operated in a storefront next door to the drugstore. 

Forty-three years later, Rhonda still works at the health department, where she has served as administrator since 1990.

In 1977, Phyllis married Alva Hollingsworth, a World War II veteran who had arrived on Omaha Beach on “D Day plus two” and then went on to fight in the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, he was employed as a “material handler” during the construction of Bull Shoals Dam. Then he spent a few years in Wichita, Kansas, working for the Boeing aircraft company.

Back in Ozark County, Alva, a divorced father of two, lived at Howards Ridge and was 15 years older than Phyllis. After their marriage, he and Phyllis parented three teenagers, Phyllis’ son Layne plus Alva’s daughter Anita and son David. “We were happy as clams,” Phyllis said. 

She and Alva went to Hawaii for their honeymoon and enjoyed traveling to other far-off places, including Alaska and a cruise to Mexico. They also loved being with their family. All the grandkids in the blended family loved Alva, and he had a nickname for each of them. 

Both Phyllis and Alva worked at the Lab until Alva retired in 1978. That was the same year Glenda and Allen’s second child, Jennifer, was born. The charcoal kilns operation closed, and the property was sold to Morrison Fertilizer. Allen began operating his own over-the-road truck line. Later, he and Joe McFarland bought the auto-parts store June and Loren Hillhouse had started. Allen’s next job, selling cars, first at Amyx Auto in Gainesville and then at Morlan-Shell in West Plains, would last nearly 30 years, until he retired in 2015.

Glenda worked in some local offices, including the medical office Dr. Ed Henegar opened on the Gainesville square. Later, she worked as social services director and assistant administrator when Henegar and his first wife, Barbara, opened the Gainesville Health Care Center. The last years of Glenda’s career were spent with what is now the Missouri Department of Senior and Social Services, working in the areas of child support and family services. 

Glenda retired in 2011, but she couldn’t forget the children she saw during her years with family services. “I was seeing kids come in hungry, with no socks, no shoes,” Glenda said. “Families came in at lunchtime, hungry and cold. I started keeping snacks at the front desk for them.”

In her job with the health department, Rhonda oversees the Ozark County Food Pantry, which sometimes serves as many as 400 families each month, so she’s also aware of the needs in this area. 

The two sisters work hard to help. Glenda started the Kids in Need program at First Christian Church. Each year in November it collects infant and children’s sleepers, underwear, socks, diapers and wipes to be distributed to families who need them. “Other churches have joined in, and people in the community have been very generous,” Glenda said. During covid, the program received $1,000 in donations from throughout the area. “That buys a lot of diapers and sleepers,” she said with a smile. The Kids in Need program at First Christian Church is funneled through the OCHD and serves children in Ozark County. 

For information about donating to or receiving food from the food pantry, call OCHD at 417-679-3334.

Happiness and heartache

Phyllis Hollingsworth is someone who loves to laugh and shares joy wherever she goes. But she and her family have also known devastating shock and excruciating heartache through the years. In 1985, Phyllis’ son Layne died unexpectedly at age 22. In September 1999, her grandson John Suter, 24 – Rhonda and Mark’s oldest son – was killed in a car crash. 

And then, in October 2012, Alva died at age 94. He and Phyllis had been happily married for 35 years. His obituary described him as “a kind and gentle man” who “never said a bad word about anyone. He walked through this world with a smile on his face and love in his heart.”

Just a month after that very hard loss, in November 2012, Rhonda and Mark’s second son, Seth – Phyllis’ grandson – died at age 33. A few weeks later, the family gathered again to mourn the death of Glenda’s father-in-law, Barney Douglas, who died in December 2012 at age 95.

That year of repeated tragedies was almost too hard to bear. But Phyllis and her daughters aren’t ones to let themselves be consumed by grief. There is always work to be done and, one step at a time, they carry on. 

For Phyllis, there’s usually something colorful to create as well. And, quite frequently, there’s something to celebrate too, now that her family includes a total of 10 grandchildren and step-grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren and four great-great-grandchildren. She loves hosting the whole family - 25 to 30 laughing, hugging, talking relatives – for Christmas get-togethers. Everyone settles around big tables set up throughout the dining and living rooms and enjoys a holiday meal including Phyllis’ traditional Christmas punch or hot cranberry tea. “Mom does the meat, and we bring the rest,” Glenda said. 

‘She radiates kindness’

A few months ago, in March, the family gathered again for an extra-special event. When Glenda told Phyllis the grandkids were going to be involved in an upcoming special service at the church, of course she wanted to go. The date arrived, and Phyllis rode with Glenda to the First Christian Church. 

When they arrived at the church, the parking lot was full, and Phyllis may have wondered if they were late for the program, whatever it was. But what it was, was a surprise party, a joy-filled celebration of Phyllis’ 90th birthday. More than 100 friends and relatives filled the church’s fellowship hall to honor the petite woman who had touched all their lives with her gracious and humble ways.  

“It was kind of a big deal,” Phyllis said, smiling as she remembered it. 

“She’d been missing ‘her people,’” Glenda said, referring Phyllis’ Howell County relatives who were there for the party. Glenda and Allen’s son, Jeff, may have come the farthest, traveling from his home in San Francisco. 

They came, not out of a sense of duty, but to celebrate with someone they all cherish.

Phyllis’ niece, Darla Fox Dennison, described it best in a Facebook post afterward that said, “She has always had such a lovely aura around her. She is peaceful and calming, and she radiates kindness from her core. She loves her family, and she loves her God.”

And, it could be said, she works hard too.