Storyteller recounts growing up and characters in her hometown
S
ue Stone grew up to be a storyteller. The daughter of Glenn “Stonie” Stone, a watch repairman and clock shop operator in Monett, and Lela Stone, grew up in Monett in the 1950s and 1960s. Her new book, “Home Again. Home Again. Jiggity, Jig,” describes the Monett she knew, the characters who inhabited it and experiences that helped shape her life. “I grew up just a block from the old Monett Times [at 212 Fifth St., west of City Hall], on Bond Street, across from the old library, where my father had a clock shop,” Sue recalled. “I grew up working nights in the concession stand at the Monett Gillioz Theatre. Also my older sister, Betty, worked there, as did my cousins, Betty Kelley and Janice Essary Bowen. Momma later worked there. “We all worked at the summer drive-in when it was opened. In fact, Momma was town famous for her hamburgers. Everyone knew Momma.” Now married to Arthur Chidlovski, the noted Russian hockey historian, Sue is eager to continue her journey of memories, picking up her tale in St. Louis as a teacher. After heading off to college at School of the Ozarks in 1960 and later to Drury College, she taught school for about 18 years, edited two newspapers in South Carolina and later wrote for the Chelsea Record in Massachusetts and the Winthrop Transcript in Boston. She earned a master’s degree in theater at Emerson College in Bos-
Story by Murray Bishoff
ton, and subsequently worked as a director and producer. It was in Monett that life took shape. It is back to Monett where Sue’s memories return. “I knew almost everyone in Monett in those days,” Sue recalled. “There was a quality to the town, a small town touch. Everybody knew everybody. You’d walk into a store and they knew you. If I was coming home from college, my mom would stop in the Penney’s store and say, ‘I need a couple outfits for my daughter. What can I take home for her to try on?’ And she’d bring several home.” Helping people, particularly extending a helping hand to a young woman such as herself, seemed to be what Monett people naturally did. Sue recalled that her family was active at the Presbyterian Church. When the minister was on vacation, church leaders would ask her to fill in. L.G. Jones, mayor in the early 1950s who ran a Texaco station, also rented typewriters. He told Sue, “Whenever you come home from college, there will be a typewriter at your home any time you need it.” While Sue was studying at Drury, she would come home on weekends and work as a waitress at the Lakeland Restaurant, facing Highway 60, west of Kyler Street, run by Floyd and Eleanor VanDerhoef. In addition to providing Sue with lunch and dinner, Eleanor would slip her a $20 bill on Sunday nights as Sue left to head back. “Eleanor would tell customers,
‘She’s working her way through college, so you tip her good.’ The little ladies from the church would come to my table when I worked there. They would each leave me a dime. I worked there all through college,” Sue said. Monett was also full of characters in those days. Sue’s family fit right in. “Every election year, Dad would always hang banners around the shop and get out his Victrola and play Sousa marches,” Sue recalled. “He ran against V.B. Hall [in the 1940s] for mayor as a write-in. V.B. would always come by to see how he was doing.” Her father was active in the Masons in Monett. In her senior year in college, Sue lost the scholarship that helped her. As a Rainbow Girl, the Masons loaned her the funds to make up the lost scholarship funds to complete her degree. She remembered Dr. Frank Kerr, a big man with a booming voice whom her family went for care.
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