Bonnie Jean Brown Lynn

Bonnie Jean Brown By: Bonnie Lois Lynn Lusk
Bonnie Jean Brown was the fourth child and only daughter of William White Brown and Sarah Susan Birdwell. She was born in Charlie Brown Hollow in Jackson County Tennessee. Her brothers were John L., Lewis Austin, Fred Henry, and Billie Boyd. Jean grew up on a farm in White's Bend, Jackson County Tennessee, located about a mile from Fort Blount Ferry. It was there that her life intertwined with Samuel Asa Lynn who lived on an adjoining farm. I don't know very much about Jean when she was growing up. Billie Brown told me she broke off her front tooth swinging on a gate with her brother, Fred. Her parents moved to Baxter when she was school age so their children could get an education. She received her education at Baxter Seminary School. Her family lived in Baxter, Tennessee for one year, then moved to Double Springs, Tennessee. They moved back to Jackson County around 1929 or 30. While they were living in Baxter, Jean's brother, Fred got Typhoid Fever. He was seventeen years old. Alma Brown said a lot of doctors came over to see him and held a conference on what they could do and decided he was going to die. Typhoid fever worked on the intestines and the doctors would not let him have food. According to Alma Brown, Jean couldn't stand to see him hungry so she would slip him some. Later, they said that is what saved him. Jean moved to Detroit with two other girlfriends, Grace Patterson and Alma Brown thinks Johnnie Anderson and they worked in a factory there for part of the summer. Her brother, John L. lived in Michigan. Grace's husband had a bus and drove them to Detroit. Uriah and Mary Brown had a house there and rented rooms to the girls. Sam and Jean were dating at this time, however, Jean had met another guy from Detroit that she dated also. I don't know if she was serious about him when he came to visit or he just decided to go to Tennessee on his own. Anyway, he was not a farm boy but was eager to prove that he could be. He decided to chop some wood for the house and Jean's brothers really had a laugh at his expense. It seems he was trying to chop the wood with the wrong end of the axe. Alma Brown said Jean looked at her and said, "I guess I just don't have a lick of sense." I think her brothers played a lot of tricks on him. Alma Brown said Sam and Jean had a big ruckus over this but things smoothed out and she married Samuel Asa Lynn July 16, 1931 at her parent's home by Elder John W. Fox. They drove to the Smokie Mountains for their honeymoon. Sam and Jean moved to an apartment in Cookeville where Sam worked in his Uncle Sam Crawford's auto dealership. Jean and Sam Lynn had eight children. The oldest, Arthur Lewis, died when he was 5 weeks old. That was a very sad and tragic time for them. Alma Brown told me that Arthur Lewis had been sick ever since he was born. They had taken him to Nashville to the doctor the day before he died and the doctor said he was fine. On the way back from Nashville, they had stopped to spend the night with Pa and Ma Lynn to tell everyone the good news. They drove on to Cookeville the next day. The next morning, they had breakfast, fed Arthur Lewis and put him back to bed and Sam went to work. Later in the morning, Jean discovered that Arthur Lewis had died. It was May 16, 1932. Mom thought it might have been what is now known as Infant Death Syndrome. The other seven, Joe Brown, Billy Campbell, Sammie Jean, Martha Susan, Bonnie Lois, Patricia Ann, and Janice Ellen have all lived to give Sam and Jean great joy and pain over the years. We had wonderful times growing up and also coming home each year for reunions after moving away. In the early years, Mom and Dad moved to the Old Fox Place at Fort Blount. Joe Brown was born in the Lynn Hollow, according to Billy Brown. Mom had a lot of health problems when she was young. When Joe was a baby, she had to have an appendectomy and, according to Uncle Billie and Aunt Alma, almost died after this surgery. She was in the hospital six weeks, and Joe, being a small boy, forgot her. He was staying with Grandmother Brown, and when Dad would come in from visiting Mom in Nashville, Grandmother Brown would ask "how is Jean?" When Mom finally came home from the hospital, Joe called her Jean because that is what he heard others call her when they discussed her health. Dad bribed Joe into calling her Mom with a shiny new red fire truck. Mom and Dad decided to move to Cookeville and rented and later bought a house on Willow Street. Billy Campbell, Sammie Jean, Martha Susan and Bonnie Lois were born here. Sam decided to get into the trucking business. According to Alma Brown and Billie Brown, his first truck hauled corn. When Mom was in the hospital in Nashville, Uncle Lewis and Uncle James drove the truck full of corn to Nashville for Dad and visited with him and Mom. He bought a chicken truck and started hauling chickens to Kentucky. A buyer would then sell them to Jewish markets in New York City. Sam was able to buy some more trucks and decided to cut out the middle man and drive to New York himself. Mom was left alone many days taking care of five of her children while Sam was away. He owned chicken trucks and had to travel a great deal. and Mom was in charge of the household, being both Mom and Dad while he was away. Dad gave up the trucking business and he bought an Esso station on East Spring Street. He and his brother, James, bought Lynn's Service Station. It had two bays instead of just one. Things were looking good, so they bought a house on Washington Avenue. Mom always said this was her dream house. Sammie and Bill gave her a few gray hairs when they were sailing paper airplanes that Bill would light, and one sailed into the drapes. The drapes caught fire but the damage was not too bad. It had to be another bad time for Sam and Jean when Joe Brown came down with Rheumatic Fever and was in a wheelchair for a year. He missed the seventh grade of school. In the meantime, World War II began. Dad and James were called. Dad began teaching Mom to drive. He bought a 1940 Chevrolet, one of the first cars with an extra shift on the steering wheel so it would be easier for her to drive. Dad put a South wind Heater in it. I understand the gas heater would heat up a car very fast. Dad installed a lot of these heaters in cars since they did not come with one in those days. Mom learned to drive the Chevy, and Dad went in for his physical to go to war. He was turned down with high blood pressure and flat feet. I don't believe Mom ever drove a car after that. She always said this was one of her biggest mistakes. Uncle James passed his physical and was sent to the Pacific, and Dad bought his half of the service station. With Dad's instinct about business, he was able to make a good living during the war. He would travel around and buy any kind of tire he could get because he knew they would be hard to find with the war going on. Another tragic time for them was during World War II when their house burned. It was because of faulty wiring. Nothing was saved except one picture album that was on a table by the window. Someone reached in and grabbed it. Mom and Dad were so busy trying to talk a man up the stairs from the basement, they didn't think to pick up anything. Dad had stored a lot of his tires in the basement and I guess the man was trying to save them. The basement flooded and the tires were saved but they lost everything else. They had a hard time trying to buy household goods because of the War. I have the glass bowl they were able to buy at Sears that we called our "Banana Pudding Bowl" because that is what Mom put in it most of the time. It was big and would feed all of us. After the fire, Mom and Dad moved out to Uncle Hubert Crawford's place in Cookeville, Tennessee, while they decided where to move. It was a big house and had a Calvary barn where they trained men and horses during the war. They called it Camp Walton. I don't remember a lot about living there except Mom finding the rattlesnake in the kitchen and Sammie and Sue getting almost run over by two horses. Sammie was practicing her whistling when the horses heard her whistle and came running. Patricia Ann must have been born here in 1945 because we moved to Flynn's Lick in 1946. Mom had a lot of health problems when she was a young woman. When she was pregnant with Pat, her gallbladder began giving her problems. The doctor decided to operate even though she was 5 months pregnant. Luck was on her side with this surgery. She was fine and the baby was born healthy. Dad decided a general store would make a good living, and Mom always supported anything Dad wanted to do, so they decided to move to Flynn's Lick in Jackson County. They bought Dr. Anderson's farm in 1946 and started building Sam Lynn's Store. The house had a porch that went all the way around it and Dad closed in one side for the girl's bedroom and the back for the boy's bedroom. I bet no one had a bedroom as long and narrow as we girls had. Mom and Dad's bedroom had a glass door going to the porch and that was our only way to get into the rest of the house. The boys had to go through the bathroom to get into the house. The house had a stained glass light that hung in the dining room that I now have and a rocking chair that came from this house. The rocking chair became Dad's favorite when he was fighting cancer because it was easy to sit in and he could stand up easily from it. Mom not only managed the house and cooking, she also managed the store when Sam was farming. She also spent many hours sewing for her daughters. She was a wonderful seamstress, and made all of our clothes while we were young. We were very proud of them, well, almost all of them. She made me a pretty blue floral from flour sacks. Back then, women would cherish the fabric that flour came in and they would pick out the flour with the fabric they wanted. I really liked this dress, and I remember my necklace with the red stone that I always wore with it. After a time, the dress became too short, but Mom, always able to keep us in clothes, decided I could get more wear out of it if she put in a wide white band around the waist. I always thought it was still too short and couldn't wait to outgrow it. Now, I wouldn't take anything for the picture of me wearing it. Janice Ellen was born when we lived at Flynn's Lick. She is the only child of Mom and Dad to be born in a hospital. Dad took Mom to Livingston, Tennessee to give birth to their youngest. We had different girls staying with us when we lived at Flynn's Lick. Mom was sick a lot. The doctor decided the climate was not good for mom, so they sold the store and we moved back to Cookeville. Big grocery stores were beginning to come in so Dad decided it was time to do something else. He and Mom decided to build a motel. Dad and Mom bought a house on 6th street and we lived there for a year while they were building Lynn's Motel. Dad and Bill built a breakfast room on the house. Rooms were rented out upstairs to Tennessee Tech boys. They had an outside entrance and we never saw them downstairs. Dad worked at McReynolds Nash Motors as a bookkeeper and later became Cookeville City Clerk . Mom put up with a lot from us over the years, but Cookie, the squirrel, was too much for her. Bill found a baby squirrel and raised him in his room on 6th street. Cookie liked to explore and tease Mom. The end came when Mom was vacuuming the living room and Cookie decided to jump from the stairs onto her head. Cookie was banished from the house and learned to be a wild squirrel after that episode. He had not been raised in the wild and was used to the good life. Every morning when the milkman delivered the milk, we would find a hole in the top and the milk would be down in the bottle. They discovered Cookie was drinking the milk. Each top was punctured because he could only reach so far into the bottle. Back then, milk was delivered to your door. It was in a glass jar with a round cardboard top on it. We have a jar from Tullahoma that my husband, Marion found at his house. We had some good times on 6th street. Friends would stop by and play and Dad brought home a big barrel that we would stand on and roll down the hill. I thought it was a big hill when I was in the fifth grade, but when we drove by it to take a picture of the house, it was just a little slope in the yard. We moved to our new house by the motel, and were home at last. That was our last move. Again, while Dad worked as City Clerk and bookkeeper for Jess Owens' Pepsi Cola Bottling Company, Mom managed the motel, cleaned the rooms, and fixed breakfast and lunch every day, (Dad came home for lunch). Our job was to help fix breakfast, do the dishes, and keep the house clean. Mom didn't have time to do all the sewing for us when we got older, so Dad would drive us to Nashville twice a year to buy clothes. Mom would make sure we had school clothes as well as dress clothes. We would come home with dresses, shoes, purses, and hats to match. I remember Dad fussing at Mom because she would come home with only a new hat for herself. Her children always came first. We would always meet Dad for lunch. He would take all of our packages to the car and then we would go to Woolworth's Dime Store for lunch. Back then, there were no restaurants and Woolworth's had a long bar and bar stools in which they served lunch. We would stand in line, behind the people eating (sometimes 3 or 4 deep) waiting for them to finish. When they were through, the next person would sit down and eat. I would usually order turkey and dressing. Dad was a really patient man to put up with all of us girls. He would sit in the shoe department at Harvey's Department Store and watch baseball games all day while we shopped. Back then, the shoe department had a television. Mom had to be very patient too to put up with us and help us buy clothes for the season. It was an all-day trip. Mom was a wonderful cook. She got plenty of practice with her big family. When we had unexpected company, it didn't bother her. She would just pull out more frozen chicken and thaw it out in water. We always had chicken on weekends. She made biscuits and all the trimmings every morning. She believed a good breakfast was important for us. Mom and Dad made a good living with both their jobs. They managed to send all their children to college or trade school. Joe Brown and Billy Campbell went to Coyne Electrical School in Chicago, Illinois. After finishing school, Joe moved to Allied Electronics in Chicago, after 18 months with Zenith Radio and Television. Bill joined the Army. Sammie Jean went to nursing school in Nashville, and Martha Susan, Bonnie Lois, Patricia Ann and Janice Ellen went to Tennessee Tech in Cookeville. When the mortgage was paid off on the eight rooms, they decided to build more rooms for the motel, and a swimming pool. They could no longer get the crab orchard stone that was on the original section of the motel, so they started looking for another one. They almost bought one in Mc Minnville, Tennessee that they really liked when I was in high school or college, but decided to stay in Cookeville and add more rooms to the one they had. We really had fun coming home and enjoying the pool. Tragedy struck again when Sam got cancer. Dad died July 28, 1966, from lung cancer. Mom was left to manage the motel and pay off the debt for the new addition. She never gave up. She worked hard managing the motel and still helping clean rooms when the help was absent. She paid off the debt. Mom said the motel was a lifesaver for her. It was good company and it kept her busy. Pantsuits became very popular around this time, and we all tried to get Mom to buy one, but she was born in an era when women did not wear pants in public. Finally, she bought one and got up the courage to wear it. Once she did, she was very pleased and bought many more. She discovered they were warm in the winter and comfortable. Mom managed Lynn's Motel until her health made her sell. When she was 62 years old, she had her first stroke, which paralyzed her right side. With courage and determination, she regained the use of the right side of her body. She continued to have mini strokes for the next 10 years, always facing them with courage and determination. She was able to regain the use of her right side for many years, and each stroke was harder for her to recover. Each stroke was getting stronger and making her weaker. Finally, April 2, 1983, the massive stroke that we feared happened and she passed away. Mom was not only a businesswoman, but a crafter as well. Besides being the best seamstress, she loved needlepoint. She gave each of us a needlepoint picture that she had made for us. She liked to crochet until her eyes were unable to do close work. I wish I had taken the time to learn to do that when she was able to teach me. She also liked embroidery. Mom made a beautiful "Tree of Life" quilt. Dad helped her by cutting out some of the fabric. He had retired then, so they worked on it together. The last craft she did were her Christmas ornaments. Her tree was full of ornaments that she had made. She used fabric, beads, rhinestones, ribbon, and any other materials she could find. They were all beautiful. After one of her strokes, we brought her to Texas for six weeks. When she was able to use her right hand, she and I went out and bought some embroidery kits. She chose a door pull and I chose a scene of Mabry Mill. Mom finished hers, but it was a struggle for her. She kept dropping her needle and couldn't thread it but she never complained. I am proud of that door pull. I was still working on mine and she wanted to help me so, I let her finish the mill scene. By that time, her paralysis was going away. It was easier for her and good exercise for her hand. She began to grow restless and wanted to go home. She told us she had to go home and plant her tomatoes. (It was February). We couldn't help but laugh but she was beginning to get homesick. We thought we had her talked into staying until the girls had spring vacation, but Pat had come out to Texas on business and when Mom found that out she said " I will go home with Pat. It is the long way home, but at least I am on my way." We could not talk her into staying any longer. She told me that if she ever got home, she would never leave again and she didn't. I guess there is no place like home. Jean was a very strong woman and a versatile lady for her time. She was a wonderful woman, wife, and mother. ----------------- Bonnie Lois Lynn Lusk
Mom had many funny stories about growing up with four boys.She was quite a mischievous girl in her younger years. We told her many times that she got away with things that we couldn't begin to do. I miss the many nights at the motel when Mom and Dad, Uncle Fred and Aunt Alma, and Uncle James would start reminiscing about the old days, such as riding the horse through the house when Papa and Mama Brown were gone. I loved the story when Mom, Uncle James, Uncle Lewis, and Aunt Mary were going to a church revival meeting. It seems they were not in a hurry, and when they got to church, everyone was standing and singing. Thinking this was the first song, they didn't see any seats for four people, so they marched up the aisle to the first pew, not realizing this was the invitational song to join the church. I never did find out if they were baptized at this time. Another story had Jean, wanting to go visit Fred and Alma Brown, and Lewis had a date and wanted the horse. Jean was to take the mule. However, after Lewis saddled up the mare and went in to change clothes, Jean jumped on the horse and went to Fred and Alma Brown's house to spend the night. Mom said many times that Alma was the sister she never had. As you already guessed, Uncle Lewis ended up taking the mule. I never heard if Mom got punished. This group would set around and tell stories and laugh until tears came into their eyes. I wish I had recorded all of them. I just can't recall so many. Just one more story: Mom and Aunt Alma Brown were gathering eggs and were walking toward the house when she noticed Uncle Fred holding their goat that liked to chase them. There they were with their aprons full of eggs yelling "Don't you do it Fred Brown." Well, Fred loved a joke and let the goat go. Mom said they barely made it to the house with the eggs. Joe has written so much about Sam Lynn that I have tried not to add too much about him in my article on Jean. However, I will add two of his many funny stories he told about when he had his chicken trucks. Dad had a sleeper on his truck so one guy could sleep while the other drove. One night when Dad was driving, he got sleepy so he pulled off on the shoulder of the road and started jogging up the road. The guy that was with him woke up and saw Dad running and he thought the truck was on fire, so he jumped out and ran after Dad, thinking he had left him in the truck. Another time when Sam was driving his load of chickens to New York, he arrived on the weekend when it was a Sabbath day. The Rabbi, who had to bless the chickens, did not work that day but Sam knew the man in charge and talked him into letting him leave his chickens so he didn't have to stay the weekend. Anyway, they were walking through the plant and Dad noticed a chicken lying on the floor by a barrel and he picked it up and put it on top of the other chickens not realizing he could not touch them. Only the Rabbi could pick it up. The man with Dad was thinking very quickly in front of his men. He turned to Dad and said, "Thank you Rabbi Linsky". Dad told that story more than once.

Jean Lynn (Obituary)
Cookeville--Funeral services for Mrs. Jean Lynn, who died Saturday (April 2, 1983) in Huntsville, Ala., will be held here Monday.Services will be at 11 A.M. in the chapel of Hooper & Huddleston Funeral Home, and burial will be in Cookeville City Cemetery.Mrs. Lynn was 72. She was the widow of the late Sam Lynn, and daughter of the late Bill and Susan Birdwell Brown.She is survived by five daughters, Sammie Chance of Huntsville, Ala; Sue Miller, Boston, Mass.; Lois Lusk, Houston, Tex.; Janice Lynn, Dallas, Tex.; and Pat Everhart, of Washington, D. C.; two sons, Bill Lynn, of Manchester, Tenn.; and Joe Lynn, of South Bend, Ind.; and a brother, Billy Brown, of Gainesboro.Officiating at tomorrow service will be Bro. Clarence DeLoach. Hooper & Huddleston is in charge of arrangements.