She Magazine JULY 2016 | Page 38

Southern Belles feature Story by Cassie Graham Rogers • Photographed by Milton Morris M Mrs. Jane grew up on her father’s farm just outside of Olanta in a house full of women. She was the middle child of three girls. Everyone around town knew the famous Proctor Sisters: Bobbie, Jane, and Elaine. The trio was musically inclined; they even had their own radio show. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the station where the sisters hosted their very own Saturday morning show was called WJMX in Florence. WJMX still exists, but we know it as 103X or 103.3 on the tuner. Each Saturday morning, The Proctor Sisters Show was filled with current hits the sisters would sing live on the air. They even took requests for popular songs of the day like “Aba Daba Honeymoon,” “Snow Bird,” “I Love You Truly,” “In Your Easter Bonnet,” “Put Your Hand in the Hand,” songs from The Sound of Music, “On The Sunny Side of the Street,” “Carolina Moon,” “Kiss Me Sweet,” and “Let Her Go.” As she lists off the titles of songs she and her sisters sang, Mrs. Jane hums and sings lines to herself. She can remember those Saturday mornings with her sisters very clearly, especially Slim Mims and His Dream Ranch Boys. That group would be in the studio waiting to do their show while, in the meantime, Slim Mims would put his face against the glass outside the studio. He’d make faces at the girls to make them laugh while they were singing. The Proctor Sisters Show began with their theme song, “Some Sunday Morning,” sung live by the sisters. Mrs. Jane’s older sister, Bobbie Jean, was around eighteen and sang soprano, Mrs. Jane was fourteen, and her younger sister, Elaine, was thirteen when they hosted their radio show. Mrs. Jane laughs as she remembers; that era was when you could buy a post card for a penny, so fans would send in requests for the sisters to sing on penny-postcards. At the conclusion of their radio broadcast, the sisters’ tradition was to sing a hymn. The entire duration of the broadcast was fifteen minutes, and most of the time, the Proctor Sisters didn’t know what they’d be singing any given Saturday morning until they arrived at the studio. In addition to their radio show, the sisters sang not only at their church but also at churches all around Olanta, at Junior-Senior banquets, and in the Glee Club at Olanta High School. When the girls weren’t practicing piano or memorizing popular song lyrics for their upcoming weekly show, the Proctor Sisters were helping their parents load and unload tobacco barns on the farm or working at their dad’s Esso (now known as Exxon) station. “Most people didn’t have a problem with it, but some men refused to let us inspect their vehicles at the station because we were women. We’d get under the cars, check the oil and tires, and pump gas. We could do it all.” In the evenings after a long day’s work, Mrs. Jane remembers her father requesting for the girls to sit around the piano to play and sing for him. “I wish Sammie (my husband) could have heard Mother play the piano before she died. She could really tickle those ivories,” Mrs. Jane says as she reminisces of nights of her family gathered around the piano doing what they did best. She declares that getting up in the middle of the night to help her family unload tobacco barns really wasn’t her favorite part of being raised in the South. She told her mother she would never marry a farmer so that she could avoid this type of work. However, Mrs. Jane ended up falling in love with the epitome of a Southern agriculturalist, Mr. Sammie Morris. If it weren’t for him and their son, Milton, she wouldn’t be chasing chickens back to the coop and snapping beans every day this summer. I ask Mrs. Jane what her favorite recipe is—the most perplexing question I could ask an open cookbook like herself. “Probably something sweet, any kind of dessert,” she says. She also mentions a shrimp and rice casserole dish and then a chicken and dressing recipe that makes my mouth water. No matter what a lady prepares for the table, her paramount responsibility when entertaining is making her guests feel at home, at ease, and comfortable, Mrs. Jane explains. This, along with having good manners, using proper grammar, and being well-dressed are the requirements of a Southern lady. “Cassie, I don’t really think of myself as a Southern Belle. I’m just plain, old me,” she says as I prepare to leave. She is an open cookbook—full of sweet, full of savory, and filled with endless possibilities. I wish I could bottle up her accent and preserve it for years to come so that I could somehow figure out how to describe it on the page so that readers could hear her Southern drawl as they read the words, realize her Southern ways are as sweet as her strawberry preserves, and smell the yeast bread as it rises in the oven. Mrs. Jane Morris lives with her husband, Sammie, in Olanta. When she isn’t dealing with her son’s chickens, she en joys spending time with the members of her Sunday School class, playing with her younger grandchildren, and, of course, cooking when she can. She and her husband have two children: Milton and Sandra Buss. Mrs. Jane is the loving grandmother of four: Ivan, Zane, Erich and Kevin. 40 JULY 2016 SHEMAGAZINE.COM