BY HELEN HANNAN, Courier Correspondent
December 18, 2007 05:59 pm
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CENTERVILLE — Equilla is an unusual name, but perfect for Equilla Duley, an unusual lady. She has no idea why her parents chose the name. “My mother died when I was five so I never had a chance to ask her,” she said.
At 91, she is vibrant, interesting, entertaining, eagerly adjusting to another change in her life. She recently moved from her home in Moulton to St. Joseph Continental in Centerville. “This is such a beautiful place,” she said. “Everybody is so nice, the food is good and I don’t have to do a thing.”
She admitted missing “going to work” — working at First Methodist Church in Moulton — but she is accustomed to making adjustments.
Duley seldom watches television because she would rather visit or read “just about anything.” She belongs to a Bridge Club, likes to play bridge, canasta, pitch or anything with cards.
Born in Wyoming, an only child, she was raised by her grandmothers in southern Missouri near the Arkansas border.
She has little memory of the long trip to Ava, Mo., except “laying on the floor and crying in a big building, probably Kansas City train depot,” she said. “An attendant who was probably trying to get me to stop crying, came over and told me she knew a dog that wanted to be petted. It was a great big artificial dog. I petted the dog and got over crying,” she laughed.
Her train trip finally ended in Springfield, Mo., where a man — she doesn’t know who — met her. She remembers that “he drove a truck. It was night and we stopped at a woman’s house, maybe his mother. The lady fed us cold corn bread and clabber milk. And we ate it! I was hungry. I probably hadn’t had anything to eat for three days, for the whole trip from Wyoming.”
Childhood memories include going to the store owned by her maternal grandparents. She was “allowed to pick out what ever I wanted to eat, usually pork and beans,” she said.
Duley chuckled merrily as she tells about “the only spanking I ever got at school.” She cut her hair at school with her new pair of scissors which were “nice and sharp.” She doesn’t remember what the hair cut looked like, but thinks she must have cut off quite a bit. “I kind of enjoyed that whole pile of coal black hair,” she said.
She lived with two grandmothers who insisted she put on long underwear and long stockings well before it was really cold in the fall and wouldn’t let her quit wearing the hated garments until spring days were balmy. She remembers the “great lumpy roll of stockings around the ankles” and the tedious chore of rolling the underwear legs up as high as possible, hoping they wouldn’t drift down to dangle beneath her dress.
She attended Good Hope, Mo., through 10th grade; 11th grade in Shenandoah while living with her father and her final year at Moulton High School, graduating in 1934. In spite of the Depression, it was a good year. “I joined everything, the newspaper staff, played basketball, everything,” she said.
Duley attended Cedar Falls and Kirksville colleges and took correspondence courses. Her first job was teaching grades 1–8 at Seden. Although she “never really liked to teach,” she taught off and on from 1936 to 1985 because there “wasn’t much of anything else to do.”
She also was employed with the California State Water Resources Department; was a mobile home park owner which was “fun for a little while then got dull;” and Century 21 Realtor, both in Arizona; Hy-Vee and social worker in Centerville. “I loved selling real estate. I made a million dollars in sales every year, mostly in small $50,000 houses,” she said.
Duley returned to Moulton in 1987 to help her only daughter, Ruth, who was on dialysis for 10 years before she got a kidney transplant. “She is fine now,” Duley said.
“Life is full of memories,” she said. She concentrates on the positives rather than the negatives.
“Children are such a blessing,” she said. Widowed twice, she dotes on her “four wonderful children,” 11 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren with number 12 due soon. “They are all wonderful, everyone of them.
“I have had lots of fun,” she reflected. “I enjoy living. I’ll probably enjoy my death. I have always looked for the fun in things.”
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