This is the easiest of all. Buy Duncan Hines devilsfood cake and Duncan Hines milk chocolate icing. Make according to the directions on the box with these changes:
Add one half cup firmly packed light brown sugar, 2 tablespoons imitation vanilla and blend in one melted Hershey chocolate bar or two rounded tablespoons Hershey chocolate ice cream topping. Bake in a greased, dusted with dry cocoa nine by thirteen baking pan.
I rang the doorbell. As the door opened they were each standing there to welcome me into their lovely home right there on Venice Florida beach front facing the Gulf of Mexico beautiful blue water.
What a lovely happy retired couple, just a smidgen old fashioned looking. They had called my Century 21 First Realty of Venice office and had ask for me. They wanted me to come to their first floor condo home to list and put it on the market. I was delighted. It would be a pleasure to sell this beach front condominium.
After inviting me to sit down, MR Jennings smiled sweetly as he ask me, ” Flo, is your name Florence?”
I smiled right back at the kindly gentleman and said, “Yes! It is!”
He looked so pleased as he said, “I have a story to tell you about Sister Florence.” and so he began. Here is his story told as he and his lovely wife Rose smiled so warmly.
“I don’t want to look at this house!” That was my buyer’s remark sitting in the back seat of my car, his wife in the front seat beside me. He had stoically just been through the four houses I had already shown to them. In my secret mind, I had given him the name “Mr Grumpy”.
I replied, “That’s alright, but since I have already called the owner and set an appointment with her and she is waiting in there for us, I have to go to the door and tell her you don’t want to see her house.”
As I open my door and start to get out of the car he grumbles, ” Oh….all….right!”
He promptly gets himself out of my car and we three proceed to the house for a ‘look see’.
These are pictures of my father Levi Gilbert Rockhold in the early years of his life.
My father, while teaching me to drive a car, told me he was born into the poorest family in the poorest community. I’ve decided that how poor someone is must be relative to who is making that statement. Those pictures do not look like the poorest to me.
My father started borrowing money from the Mt Victory bank, through the bank president Henry Dickerson, at the tender age of nineteen.
As often happened, I had taken my mother and five year old daughter Pamela Dawn to Marion Ohio, a twenty mile drive from my farm home, to go shopping.
It was just before Mother’s Day. While I went to another store down the street I left Pamela with my mother. In the meantime as they are looking around Pamela finds a present and gets $5 from my mother to purchase it to give to me for Mother’s Day.
All the way home she is basking in the joy of having a secret gift to give me. On returning home she hangs on tight to that present that is in what looks like a large shoe box. But I know it is not shoes.
Then the school bus drives up to a stop and out come her sisters, Susie, who goes directly to her room, like most teenagers, and her sister Meredythe happily bouncing in the door. Holding her boxed gift, Pamela rushes over to meet her, takes the lid off the box and they both peek in. One good look at the contents, they each raise their head and laugh.
Well………..whatever it is in that box……..it’s funny.