Good People
5questions Story and photo by David Moore
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f Inez McDonald keeps up her current level of spunky charm – exercising daily, baking banana bread for folks, perhaps even “fixing’ someone’s hair – she will still be serving on the Dodge City Council when she celebrates her 100th birthday. Although Covid-19 concerns slowed down her baking, and she doesn’t drive as much as she once did – partly because the transmission is going out on her late husband, David’s truck – she’s still an active lady. “And my mind’s as sharp as a tack,” 96-year-old Inez will let you know. And, says Dodge City Mayor Tawana Canada, Inez isn’t shy about sharing what’s on that sharp mind. “She speaks her mind and doesn’t mind doing it,” Tawana laughs. “She lets us know when she feels we are wrong … and she is usually right.” First elected in 2008, Inez was urged to run for the council by the late Mayor Perry Ray. Mayor since Dodge City’s incorporation in 1993, he died in 2009, and Tawana, mayor pro tem, took his place. The legislature this year passed a law that adds an extra year to most municipal elections so they coincide with the presidential election cycles. This means that Inez, now in her fourth term, along with the rest of the Dodge City Council, will serve a five-year term. “Do you think we’ll make it that long,” she joked at the time with Tawana. “I hope she does, and I hope I do, too,” Tawana later says. Tawana is one of numerous people over the years to benefit from Inez’s gift of banana bread. “Why don’t you give that baking a rest?” a concerned person once told Inez about her baking. 16
Inez McDonald
“I don’t tell myself I’m old,” laughs the 96-year-old Dodge City councilwoman “Oh, honey,” Inez replied, “someone might be hungry.” Tawana boils it down to this: “Inez has a servant’s heart. She’s happy serving her God.”
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child of The Depression, Inez grew up in a hard, alien world compared to today. Nonetheless, she says she was happy. “I remember kerosene lamps and electric lights hanging by a cord in the middle of a room,” she says. “We didn’t feel like we were poor. Everybody else was poor, too.” Her father, Albert Smith, a truck farmer, would drive to Birmingham to sell the vegetables he and others grew. Inez says her father dug the first hole for a power line pole in Hanceville. In her early years the family lived on a hill overlooking a covered bridge on what’s now Ala. 91. She attended first grade at the old Center Hill School. “I remember rub boards and boiling pots of water to wash with. Mother made lye soap using fat cooked out of our meat,” she says. “They’d hang meat in the smokehouse and pack it down with salt.” Her mother, Valera, cooked homegrown turnips and potatoes, along with poke salat they picked in the spring. Albert shot squirrels and rabbits to supplement the menu. They made cane syrup for consumption and to sell in Cullman. Trips were by mule-pulled wagon. Water was hauled uphill in containers riding on a mule-pulled “sled.” Inez says Valera scrubbed the rough slat floors of their rental house every Saturday using a mop made of corn shucks. “I could count the chickens under the house through the cracks in the floor,” she laughs.
AUGUST | SEPTEMBER | OCTOBER 2021
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ntertainment was simple back then. At school, big girls climbed limber trees, bending the tops to the ground so small girls, like Inez, could climb on. The big girl would get off, and the youngster would get a wild ride when the tree sprang straight again. “I got caught once and stayed up in the tree until they pulled it down again,” Inez recalls. She was 7 when her twin sisters, Vera and Era were born. They fought as youngsters. “If you tried to separate them, they both turned on you,” Inez says. That phase probably didn’t last long with Albert and Valera around. “We were taught manners – please, thank you,” Inez says. “And, ‘I love you.’ You loved everyone the same as you loved yourself. You divided what you had.” The family moved around, living at times in rental houses in Gold Ridge and on Eva Road. “My daddy had a grist meal,” Inez recalls. “I’ve seen wagons lined up to grind their meal on Saturday for as far as you could see.” Albert wasn’t paid money for milling; instead he got a percentage of the meal. He’d hook up the wagon and mule and sell the meal to stores in Cullman, an all day trip. Inez was 15 when Albert got the mumps. His cute, petite, brunette daughter quit school and stepped in to shoulder his load. “I plowed cotton with a mule,” Inez says. “That mule minded me.”
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year or so later the door opened to Inez’s eventual career. Their landlord suggested to his brother – Jessie Mayo, who owned a beauty shop in Cullman – that Inez would make a good employee. So Jessie hired her, gave her one lesson on operating the
