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| Surprise of the century Wednesday, March 03, 2010 Carolea Hassard
When Oma Romine Bobo was born on March 3, 1910, life expectancy for women in the United States was a little over 50 years.
No one is more amazed than she is to have doubled that.
“It’s surprising,” said the longtime Springtown resident. “Being outside, hard work – I think that’s the reason I’ve been so healthy.” She reports few health problems, except for a bad back and tiredness. “I sleep all night and wake up tired,” Oma noted. Otherwise, however, a lifetime of staying busy likely is key to being in as good a shape as she is today.
“I worked in my flowerbeds and I’ve always been an early riser. I still am,” she added. “I get up pretty early, about 6. But I don’t cook breakfast. I miss that.” Breakfast at Life Care Center of Haltom, where Oma has lived for seven years, can’t compare to what she what she made for more than 80 years. When she was raising her children, every morning she fed nine people biscuits, butter and syrup, eggs and ham or bacon. She churned her own butter, adding salt after churning was done and of course made use of the buttermilk that was a byproduct of making butter. One son preferred clabbered milk, or “milk that’s never been broke,” Oma said. Clabbered milk is sweet milk (what most folks think of as “regular” milk) left to sit and thicken. “It don’t pour out,” Oma said. “Buttermilk can be poured.” Oma Romine was born in Garvin County, Oklahoma, where her father harvested broom corn and picked cotton and other crops. Her mother died when Oma was 8 and her father remarried, so she grew up the eldest of two brothers, a half-brother and two half-sisters. She didn’t work in the fields but helped cook dinner – her stepmother was a good cook and she learned from her – for the hands working in the broom corn fields. Her father also grew cotton on the shares, Oma said. “I was no cotton picker,” she said. “But I was in the field. We usually ran around throwing bolls at each other.” One year the boll weevils hit and “we didn’t raise much cotton,” she said. The family also had a syrup mill. The field hands would strip the sugar canes and “carry them to the mill where they’d grind it,” Oma said. “A horse pulled the mill (stone) and ground the syrup out. The horse would get tired going round and round and you’d have to move him along.” The family moved several times, living “wherever we could find a room,” but at one point the Romines lived in a two-room house. “They were big rooms,” Oma said, “a kitchen and a bedroom. Papa built a shed on the front porch where he cured hogs.” In eighth grade, Oma was expelled from school. “I played hooky on April Fool,” she said. “We all run off – they wouldn’t go unless I went with them. We all had dinner with us (and) we went down on the creek. “My cousin was the teacher. Papa wouldn’t let me get a whipping so I got expelled,” she said. “My cousin never forgot it,” Oma added, but “he helped me and gave me a test so I got my diploma and then went to high school at Elmore City High School.” Oma went through 10th grade and decided she had enough. “I thought I was too old to go to school and went off and got married,” she said. Of course, that’s what young people were taught to expect, even though she was good at math. “I liked algebra – I was good in arithmetic,” she said. “I guess I could have made something of myself if I hadn’t gotten married.” But if she hadn’t married, she wouldn’t have seven children, 18 grandchildren, 28 great-grandchildren and six great-great grandchildren to share with the world. Oma met her husband, Lester, when he came to Oklahoma from Springtown to find work harvesting broom corn. “He stayed with his uncle who were our neighbors,” Oma said. “Then he came back to Texas and we got to writing.” Oma didn’t pine for Lester when he left Oklahoma. In fact, some time passed before he initiated contact and “I’d forgot about him,” she said. The two were married in September 1929 and didn’t move to the Springtown area until two of their children, John and Delbert, were born. In rapid succession, the other five, Bob, Lester “Junior,” Roy, Jessie Mae and Charles “Buck,” were born. “I had them all pretty close together,” Oma said, at home with a doctor in attendance. “They was all right,” she added. There followed lots and lots of plain hard work. “There was lots of washing, with the washboard running,” she said. “There was no washing machine – it was a two-day job.” Once when Oma was suffering arthritis in her feet and couldn’t stand up, Lester took the wash to a laundrymat. Otherwise, she built a fire under a big kettle outside and boiled the wash with lye soap made from hog fat. “You used scraps of crackling when you rendered your lard,” Oma said. “You trimmed the fat off the hog and cut it up in little squares and cooked it until it made grease.” The lye came already made in cans, she recalled. Bread was always biscuits –Oma made them three times a day – because “we didn’t have light bread,” she said. “A man came by one day and had cake and light bread on the seat of his truck, and my baby boy got in the pickup and ate the light bread instead of the cake.” Once light flour became widely available, Oma was able to produce delectable rolls. Times in the kitchen got even better when one of her boys bought her a new cookstove from Montgomery Ward. “It was the first new stove I ever had,” she said. “He was 17 or 18.” Oma certainly prioritized. She accompanied her husband to Arkansas one year to hunt diamonds but didn’t dig with him. “I didn’t care for it that much,” she said. “I’d sit on the hill and write letters home.” Oma remembered using salt for toothpaste and sleeping on hand-stuffed cotton or straw mattresses. When the Works Progress Administration came into being – Lester worked for them at the time – Oma took possession of a WPA-manufactured mattress. “That was the best mattress we ever had,” she said. Lester also worked for hire, earning 75 cents plus dinner, or $1 a day if you brought your own midday meal. “A dollar a day was good pay,” she said. Her children all had their chores, of course, and even learned to cook. “I worked in the fields same as they did,” she said, “and when we came in we all just worked together. “My oldest son is about a good a cook as I am,” she added. “All of my boys can cook. They can wait on themselves.” Once the kids were grown and grandkids started to come along, Oma didn’t slow down in the kitchen – or in keeping little ones. She even raised three of the grandkids herself, with no trouble. “I was an expert,” she said. “I had good lessons (and) experience).” And if you lived in Oma’s house, even if you were a grandchild, you behaved or got disciplined. “I spanked them,” she said. “If they needed it they got it. Maybe that’s why they’re good to me. I feel guilty now. “They laugh at me,” she added. “They say my spankings didn’t hurt (but) they bawled awful” when they got them. Oma used a switch, usually from a peach tree. “I was mean. They’d put me in jail now if they came in and found my switch laying on the windowsill.” Once the kids were grown, Oma continued to work in the garden, cook on holidays and whenever anyone came to visit, and learned quilting. Her hands have become stiff, but she still likes to crochet. Oma also rides a stationary bicycle, plays dominoes and does word puzzles. On Saturday, March 6, Oma’s family will host a birthday party at Springtown Church of Christ from 2-4 p.m. Everyone in the community is welcome to attend. If you can’t come, send a card to her care of Life Care Center of Haltom, Room E4B, 2936 Marcum Dr., Fort Worth 76117. |
