BARBARA HOLDAWAY: My name is Barbara Bagley Holdaway,
BECKY CRANE: And I'm Becky Crane.
BARBARA HOLDAWAY: She's one of my good friends. We usually open every day with a nice walk outside.
BECKY CRANE: What are some of your memories that you have of your mother?
BARBARA HOLDAWAY: My mother was always such a hard worker and very patient, but as a young girl, she was really spunky. And she was kind of like a tomgirl — always doing things. I remember that she broke her back because she won a tennis match. And so she ran to jump over the net to congratulate the other person and she fell. And she broke her back and she had to spend a summer on a board. Back then that's what they had to do. You just had to lay flat for your back to heal. But she was always doing kind of funny little things.
BECKY CRANE: Do you have any other memories of her that stand out to you?
BARBARA HOLDAWAY: I just remember I didn't mind getting sick when I was a little girl because my mom was so good to me. She would make a bed on the kitchen table for me, because that's where our television was, it was in our kitchen. And she would be busy working in the kitchen. She didn't want to leave me alone in the bedroom, so she would fix it up with pillows and a blanket so I could sit up. She'd bring in this stool from the bathroom, put it over my lap so I could color she would have treats for me.
It really was a delight to be sick. She was always so, so good. And so patient and such a sweet mom. Yeah.
BECKY CRANE: Oh, that's neat. If you have to be sick, it's nice to have a situation like that. Did you have any medical issues that you dealt with throughout your life?
BARBARA HOLDAWAY: Well when I was about 12 years old, I used to have really bad stomachaches. And I told my mom and she took me to the doctor. They could never figure out — it seemed like I'd always get a stomachache right after dinner. And my family thought I was just trying to get out of doing the dishes. But actually, after I really kind of passed out a few times they took me to the doctor and they told me that they couldn't find anything wrong with me. So they were gonna do exploratory surgery. And when they did the surgery, they found that I had a football sized tumor inside of my stomach and they removed it. And with it, they had to take one of my ovaries. And I wondered if that would affect if I were able to have children. But it didn't seem to make any difference. But I felt so relieved that I got that taken care of. Yeah.
BECKY CRANE: How was the world you grew up in different than the world you're living in now?
BARBARA HOLDAWAY: We didn't have a lot of medicine when we were young. I mean, we didn't have pills. I remember that we had to get shots. When I had my surgery in the hospital, I had to get a shot — a penicillin shot. I had like four shots a day, I had all kinds of little prick marks all over my back where they had to give me pills.
Back then, people would have to go to the doctor every day if they were going to get a penicillin shot. So my mother ended up learning how to get the shots. And then people in the neighborhood would ask her to give them shots. So they'd get their prescription of penicillin from the druggist. They'd bring it to my parents home. My mother she would boil her syringe. We always knew when she was giving shots because it had a really pungent odor when you boil the penicillin that was in the syringe. And people would come and she'd give them their shots for a week. You'd have to be on penicillin shots for a week.
BECKY CRANE: What did you want to do when you grew up? And did you do it?
BARBARA HOLDAWAY: Yes, I was so blessed to be able to have children and to be a teacher. Of course, being a mom, you're a teacher, but I also taught second and third grade.
BECKY CRANE: What are some life lessons you would like to pass on to your posterity?
BARBARA HOLDAWAY: I would say it's not what happens to you. It's how you respond to what happens to you. And that even bad things happen to good people. Because sometimes life is just life. We're here to learn. We're here to experience life. And sometimes we can't control what happens to us. But it's how we respond. That matters the most.
