Debbie at Chateau Apartment's
pool, September 6, 1999.
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Ed Pfueller photo
Zula Burks gets a kiss from granddaughter
Martha Strawn for her 105th birthday yesterday at Candlelight Lodge.
Zula Burks celebrated her 105th
birthday yesterday, surrounded by family and friends at Candlelight Lodge.
In a prepared statement read by a Candlelight employee,
Burks said she had always been fascinated with the rapid progress of technology.
Her surviving children said that an antique Philco
radio their mother still owns was evidence of that fascination.
With a cabinet of leather and wood, the gadget used to pick up transmissions from as far away as Berlin and Japan. Roy Burks, 82, remembered buying the radio about 1942, for use on his parents’ 160-acre dairy farm, which was then south of Columbia.
All four of the Burks’ sons served in the military during World War II and later returned home to their parents and two sisters. By that time, the farm had electricity, and Roy Burks had the Philco adapted to run on house current.
Roy Burks and his brother, Shirley Sam Burks, 77, recalled the years before and after the war were among their family’s most memorable.
Back then, the rug in their house was padded beneath with a mat of straw. The washing machine was hand-pumped, water was drawn from the well by hand, the toilet was outside the home and they mowed grass on a 2-acre lawn with a push-mower. They picked gooseberries and paw-paws to sell or sometimes eat. Water from Grindstone Creek was pure enough to drink.
They said that their mother tended to her home and children and took care of other children from time to time. She remembered babysitting Boone County Prosecutor Kevin Crane as a boy. His "clothes were awful wet a lot," she recalled.
Dola Barnett, 89, remembered fondly a record player her mother kept in the living room. "It was quite beautiful. You just cranked it up and put your needle down," she said.
Saturday nights were special, Barnett said, because their mother put the younger children to bed, pulled back the rug and straw mat in the living room and danced with the older children to tunes like "Barney Google, with the goo, goo, googly eyes," Barnett crooned.
"That was just a normal thing to do back then," Shirley Sam Burks said.
Each new appliance in the house eventually became associated with a particular memory.
"Back then we used to buy appliances for a lifetime,"
Roy Burks said. "She outlasted those appliances."
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Reach John Sullivan at (573) 815-1731 or
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