Lois Askew at 100: What an Alabama-Glens Falls tale to tell

By Mark Frost, Chronicle Editor

Lois (Whaley) Askew of Glens Falls turns 100 years old this Saturday. There will be a big party at the Queensbury Hotel, more than a hundred guests, Mayor Bill Collins proclaiming it Mrs. Lois Askew Day, and “a lot of love in the room,” says Lois’s daughter Elaine Oates.

Fortunately Lois remains a live wire and terrific interview. Get her talking and she tells stories that amaze, her memory triggered by what Elaine terms their “plethora” of photos. “We are picture-taking people,” says Elaine.

Lois says, “I lived in Alabama — Montgomery, Alabama — and I had to walk to school because I didn’t want to go to the school that I was supposed to go to in my community. I didn’t like that school.

“I had a friend in the school district that I wanted to go and I had to walk to school two-and-a-half miles.

“I didn’t have money to ride the bus. The bus didn’t cost but a nickel but if I had a dime to ride the bus, I bought candy.

“I would walk to school through a white community. See, we had segregation. We had black communities and white communities. I had to walk through the white community to get to my black school over here.”

How was that? I asked, assuming bad.

“Nobody bothered me,” said Elaine.

What did her parents think? “They didn’t care. I did whatever I wanted to do.”

Lois’s remarkable parents

Elaine shows a photo of the parents.

Lois says, “She was a wo-man!, my mother was. Don’t you mess with Miss Ada, Miss Ada’ll shoot you…

“Oh she was a wo-man! She could do anything. She could shoot a pistol, a gun, and she could work in the field. She could sew. I’d say, can you make this dress for me? She’d say, show me pictures. She could make it. She was a wo-man!”

And her father, Charles Octavius Whaley, “he was a man” — remarkably so.

When the photo of Lois’s parents is displayed, no mention is made of race, but looking at Mr. Whaley I eventually had to ask, “Was he white?”

“He was a very proud black man,” his granddaughter Elaine replied. “His father was black, his mother was white.”

Her cousin Mary Ramsey Austin, also sharing knowledge at the kitchen table during The Chronicle interview, said Charles’s parents were “mulatto,” adding, “now we say multi-racial.”

That further sparked Lois’s memory.

“He would walk me to school and somebody called me, ‘Girl, come here.’ I said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ She said, ‘You stop here and let the white man pass.’ I said, ‘That ain’t no white man. That’s my daddy.’”

In Montgomery, where they moved from the farm to advance the kids’ education, said Elaine, he worked in construction.

“Papa’s time-card said white, but he was black. He went for black,” Lois said.

Elaine says, “He was getting more pay than the black workers were. He had them change his time card” to identify him as black.

“They were a very well respected family,” Elaine adds. “Look at the pictures.”

Lois says, “We lived in a nice community. We could walk downtown, had a beautiful downtown. We had all the stores.”

She recalls “roller skating on the main highways. We always had to have skates for Christmas. We come down that hill and you don’t get in nobody’s way ’cause you’d get knocked over. It reminds me of Glen Street, going down that hill.”

Lois graduated from Booker T. Washington High School in 1941, writes Elaine, and “attended Alabama State Teachers College and Alabama State University for 2 years. Her first experience as a teacher was at Dozier Elementary School in Dozier, Alabama as a First and Second Grade Teacher.”

The Glens Falls-Woodbine connection

In the summer, Lois first came to Glens Falls. “People from the South would come to Lake George to work,” she said.

Lois worked at the Woodbine Restaurant, Bar & Cottages in Lake George, owned by Samuel and Dorothy McFerson.

Elaine says Samuel was known as Mr. Mac or Pink. Cousin Mary [Mary’s mother was the sister of Elaine’s mother] said the McFersons also operated a hotel and restaurant, known as Elmore’s — Samuel’s brother — on Glen Street in Glens Falls and later on Oakland Avenue.

The Woodbine was listed in the “Negro Motorist Green Book” that the History Channel says for three decades “provided African Americans with advice on safe places to eat and sleep when they traveled through the Jim Crow-era United States,”

How did Lois know about the Woodbine? Mary said the McFersons came family, the Whaleys, were from.

World War II transformed Lois’s life.

Initially, Elaine writes, Lois “moved back to Montgomery,” started “working at a downtown USO Club (for Coloreds).”

Lois recalls, “The guys from Tuskegee would come down to be with us women. You could come and relax and meet women and have a good time.”

One serviceman was “U.S. Army Air Corps Soldier James Caswell Askew. He was stationed at Maxwell Field Base,” Elaine writes.

Was it love at first sight? “Oh yeah, I think,” Lois replies. “He was beautiful.”

James served in the Army Air Corps, in New Guinea in the South Pacific.

He kept in touch with Lois by mail. “He detailed every letter,” with his Pacific atmospheric drawings on the envelope.

Meanwhile, writes Elaine, “To support the war effort, [Lois] moved back to Glens Falls and worked at General Electric.”

“I worked at the GE in Fort Edward,” Lois says. “I did whatever they needed to be done. I would do anything.”

On April 15, 1947, James and Lois married in Montgomery, visited James’s home area of Ahoskie, North Carolina, lived for a time in the Bronx, then chose to settle in Glens Falls in 1948.

Their Broad Street home, 70 years

Lois and James “raised 3 children: James Anthony Askew, John Charles Askew and Lois Elaine Askew at 28 Broad Street where she still resides.”

St. Alphonsus Church stood directly across the street. Elaine notes, the priest “was very supportive of a black family moving into this neighborhood.”

The house itself? Not so inviting. “When I first came in here, I couldn’t go no further than here,” says Lois. “Oh, the smell. It was a nursing home and the city had condemned it.”

James turned it into the family’s home of 70-plus years. He passed away at the age of 88 in 2008. He and Lois were married 60 years.

He was also responsible for a key aspect of the decor. Lois says, “My husband said to me one day, ‘You get all these pictures and you stick ‘em in a book and nobody can see ‘em. So I started stickin’ ‘em on the refrigerator.” Now they’re there, on the walls, on tables, and everywhere.

Lois continued her education at Skidmore College. “My occupation was a school teacher,” she says. “I taught English literature.”

She was involved early in the Prospect School with founder Marilyn Cohen and Heidi Cole. “That’s the job she retired from,” says Elaine.

She notes that her mom also worked “in the lunch room at St. Alphonsus” school across the street and “at Patrick’s,” the vending business then around the corner.

Lois says, “We lived close enough that I could walk downtown,” and recalls working at the Lerner Shop, where she was a window dresser, Elaine said.

James worked at the Queensbury Hotel and then Sandy Hill, the paper machinery maker in Hudson Falls, for 20 years as special assistant to chairman J. Walter Juckett.

The day before Lois’s 100th birthday this Saturday will be the first birthday of her first great-grandchild, Caswell Taylor Schroeder, son of granddaughter Samantha and Gerald Schroeder of Hartford in Washington County.

Samantha is the daughter of Elaine and her husband Rev. Leonard A. Oates.

Lois’s two other grandchildren are Aly-cia Victoria Askew and Jonathan James Askew, children of her son John and daughter-in-law Vicki.

Elaine’s biographical synopsis of Lois’s life adds that her involvement in the “Glens Falls community for over 75 years” includes “supporting The First Baptist Church (over 50 years), NAACP, PTA of Broad Street School, Red Hat, Home Bureau, Senior Center Dancers.

“She continually enjoys the Word of God at Faith Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church, reading, crocheting blankets, snacking…snacking…snacking…visiting with friends and enjoying her growing family.”

Speaking of snacking, Lois offered this reporter a Coca-Cola multiple times.

And a final note about the candy that Lois as a child preferred to spend her money on instead of on bus fare, she bought “chocolate with coconut because nobody would eat coconut and I didn’t want to give anybody any of my candy.”

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