A Conservative Young Lady

From Denece Ann Argyle Perkins

 

This I don't remember, but the folks have told it so often I feel that I was there.  It happened when Mom and Dad (Dora and Delbert) were courting.   My mother was always the outdoor type who loved horseback riding which came in very handy since she was raised on a cattle ranch.  When Dora was a teenager she wanted to be a trick rider when she grew up.  She would go out to the meadow and practice tricks.  She could stand on the saddle and put her leg around the saddle horn and lay backwards alongside the horse. She was always a very good rider.

 

My father's mother died when he was fourteen so his grandmother (Ellen Taylor Holroyd Argyle), a very  old fashioned lady who thought young ladies should never put on slacks and ride horses, helped raise him.  This night Dad was bringing his grandmother down to meet mom in hopes of getting her approval of the girl he hoped to marry.  Of Course, Mom primped all day long to hide her freckles she received from working in the hay fields and to look the way my great grandmother thought young ladies should look.  Finally she was dressed in her very best dress and looked very much like the lady she wanted to be when what should happen!  In walked Grandpa Baty, mother's  dad, with the simple statement that the horses had gotten out and mom would have to catch her horse and take them back to the field.  Well, you can imagine mother's horror, but it was an hour before dad was to be there so she thought if she hurried she'd be back and once more look like the conservative lady.  She got the horse to the field alright but just as she was coming down the lane as fast as the horse could run who would appear around the corner in the family's first car but my father.  Well, I guess he gulped and looked a little pale because all my great-grandmother could say was, "Dell, I hope that girl on that horse isn't the one you are planning on marrying."  Of course, after she got to know mom she approved and loved her but then you couldn't help loving my mom.

(1930 Delbert Argyle and Dora Baty)