Zela (Franks) Balkcom was the first-born child, along with twin sister Zella, of 20-year-old William Barrett Franks and 19-year-old Flora (Carder) Franks. Zella died as an infant. It was 1908, and there was something of a Franks clan living in Izard County in northern Arkansas. Barrett and Flora would go on to have a large family, with eight children surviving to adulthood. Zela would go on to have four boys with Euel Balkcom who she married in 1926.
The Franks had come to the area from Alabama and Mississippi starting in the 1850s. Arkansas was a popular destination for other ancestral families associated with the Franks, including Wolvertons, Ganns, Carders, McKamies, and McAdams. The Wolvertons are the namesakes for Wolverton Mountain of song – “They say don’t go, on Wolverton Mountain, if you’re looking for a wife”.1
In 1901, when William Barrett Franks was age 12, the family moved with other relatives to near Lockhart, Texas, between San Antonio and Austin, by covered wagon and horseback. The journey of 675 miles took 7 days. For whatever reason the families returned to Arkansas after a time and would stay there until 1912 when they, with Zela age 4 at the time, moved to north Texas along with several other family. That was in the Childress area and from then on the Franks would be a presence in Childress, Wellington, Borger, and Shamrock, Texas, and Erick, Oklahoma near the Texas border.
Zela and Euel met sometime in the 1920s when both were attending school in Erick. The Balkcoms had lived in Erick since 1918, and Zela’s family for a period in the mid-1920s. Zela was in the same class year in Erick as Euel’s younger brother Jake. 23-year-old Euel and 18-year-old Zela married in 1926, and had their first child Robert Loren in 1927 with Zela age 19. They would go on to have 3 more boys spaced several years apart – Donald Ray born 1931, Kenneth Paul born 1939, and Gerald Wayne born in 1945. In 1950 the family moved to Sayre, Oklahoma when Euel took the job as Maintenance Supervisor for the Oklahoma State Highway Department.
Although Zela was a young mother, as the oldest of eight children she was not inexperienced in child rearing. Zela was fairly strong-willed, a trait that was evident in her parenting and management of the home. She was an extraordinarily hard worker, always with jobs to do and rarely sitting and relaxing. She would sit for a few minutes and then pop up and disappear to handle something that came to mind. She was an accomplished seamstress and for the boys’ early years made their shirts and made much of her own clothing using a pedal Singer sewing machine.
Zela always had a large vegetable garden, and in season took the family to gather polk greens from the countryside. These were delicious cooked with a little bacon grease and dressed with hot sauce vinegar and black pepper. She put enough away either by canning or freezing to last through the winter, and did the same with black-eyed peas and green beans gathered from local farmers’ fields. We spent many hours on the front porch shelling peas and beans gathered by the bushel by Zela and often by Euel. Before the family had a freezer they used the community walk-in freezer down on west Main Street and the author would be directed to walk down and retrieve something for the night’s dinner.
Zela worked seasonally in the cotton fields, chopping (hoeing weeds), or pulling bolls (harvesting the cotton boll from the plant). When I was a toddler she would set me on top of the cotton sack as she dragged it along filling it with cotton. For years she worked at Harts’ Five and Dime which sold everyday essentials from household goods to toys and clothing. She took nursing training courses in the 1950s.
Zela was frugal, influenced by the Great Depression that began two years after they married and then the long Dust Bowl. She was always on the lookout to reuse, repurpose, or save for later use.
Religion was important in her life and she taught Sunday School and served on the Board of the Sayre Nazarene Church. In this way she carried on a long tradition in her Franks and Carder families many of whom were ministers going back generations, and in fact two of her brothers were ministers. She tried her best with her Balkcom family but religion never took hold there, although the boys spent many hours in Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night services, along with summer Vacation Bible Schools. Zela’s close friends were from the church. She referred to each of her women friends by their last names – Flowers, Ezell, and the like.
Zela lived to the age of 86, dying on 18 January 1995 of a heart attack at the long-time family home on Third Street. She had lived there independently after Euel’s death 14 years earlier, with occasional help from her son Loren who had retired in Sayre. She is buried in the family plot in Sayre-Doxey Cemetery.
See the Detailed Genealogy for more on Zela’s life.
Jerry Balkcom
2024
- “Wolverton Mountain”, Merle Kilgore and Claude King, 1962 ↩︎