Effie Cobb Meroney

1889 – 1970

 

The name comes from an expression I frequently heard from my grandmother   while growing up: “Anyone with one eye and half sense would know better than . . . ”

She was quite a lady, one of the few women on the prairies of West Texas and Eastern New Mexico who had a college degree. She taught school to children, taught the Bible to adults, reared three girls, farmed on 360 acres near Tatum, raised sheep and goats, homesteaded all by herself a section of land near the Caprock between Tatum and Roswell, New Mexico, had a beauty shop in town, and ran a boarding house during the Depression. But she thought the early Feminists were out of their minds.

And she wrote letters almost every week to her senators, congressmen, and legislators without a computer or typewriter. She and one or two other ranchers in Lea County were staunch Republicans who viewed the New Deal with jaundiced eyes, fearing Roosevelt’s plans for our government. She served at the polls in nearly every election because there were so few Republicans in Lea County at the time. She certainly would not recognize the wimps now in Congress who call themselves Republicans.

I think of her frequently as I scan the news each day in a world that has turned upside down and I wonder what happened to the country that I grew up in.

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