ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, November 14, 1996 TAG: 9611140004
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: BETH MACY
DATELINE: NEW CASTLE
SOURCE: BETH MACY
Their combined age is 546.
Between them, they have 14 children and 21 grandchildren.
Also, they have never gotten in a fight - unless you count the time Mildred hit Juanita in the head with a hammer. (No one remembers what it was about.)
They are the seven Crawford sisters of Oriskany, only none of them is named Crawford and none of them lives in Oriskany anymore.
The family took it for granted, explains Mildred's daughter Trena Boudreaux, that seven sisters ranging in age from 72 to 87 - all in good health, all still as close as they were growing up on the Oriskany farm - weren't much of a big deal.
"The girls," as they are called, are a big deal.
Boudreaux found that out when she and a cousin took all seven of the Crawford girls to Nashville recently for their first-ever vacation together.
Dressed in their matching Crawford Sisters shirts, they were not prepared for their weekend-long stretch of 15 minutes of fame. ``Strangers were videoing them, getting their pictures made with them,'' Boudreaux recalls. "People wanted to know if they were a club.
``We told one guy they were a recording group, and he came back the next day saying he couldn't find their albums!''
This is not a story about the sisters' visit to Opryland, or the breakfast they ate on the General Jackson showboat. It's not about how they flirted shamelessly with their cute young bus driver, Curtis Sifford of Pembroke. Or how when they saw Porter Waggoner, Ricky Skaggs, Patty Loveless and Chet Atkins - especially Chet Atkins - Juanita nearly fainted.
It's not even about the recording they made at one of those tourist studios, where they got to sing, karaoke-style, the song ``How Great Thou Art'' - the Elvis version.
It's about all the things that define that unique, quirky, love-hate-but-mostly-love relationship we call sisterhood. As in:
* Only a sister would ask another sister (Evelyn - who is 82!) to sleep on her floor, the night before the big trip. Only an 82-year-old sister would actually do it.
* Only a sister would report that Thelma was Miss Bluegrass Trail, a beauty queen at age 15, and then hasten to add: ``But in Oriskany there wasn't too much to choose from. There were only 27 other girls in the whole town.''
* Only a sister would play such practical jokes as newspapering the windows of another sister's house and hanging all her dishes out on the clothes line. ``One year we set up a yard sale in front of Cleo's house before she woke up. People were knocking on her door. We actually sold some of her stuff,'' Juanita says.
* Only a sister would offer the fact that ``Sarah snores so loud, she shakes the bed.'' But then, according to niece Trena, they all do. (And when they forget to bring their hairnets, they wear underwear on their heads to bed ``Be sure to say CLEAN underwear!'')
* And when one sister (Thelma) offers this reason for going on the trip - ``We thought we oughtta go somewhere where someone could wait on US for a change'' - only another sister (Mildred) would say: ``She doesn't cook! Her husband told her they should put the stove in a yard sale!''
Alas, there are no secrets among this gang of seven, which is the very essence of sisterhood. "They can't even keep it a secret who draws whose name in the annual Christmas-gift exchange," Trena says. Or sometimes it's not a matter of divulging secrets. They just can't remember whose name they picked.
You'll note that few quotes here are attributed to any one sister. That's because no sister can complete a sentence without another one trying to finish it for her.
"There can be 10 different conversations going on between the seven of them, and they all know what each other is saying,'' Boudreaux says.
Boudreaux, who accompanied the sisters on the bus tour - both as "their nurse and their chauffeur" - doubts the gang will do another vacation together again, other than visiting the two of the seven sisters who live out of state. When they do go visiting, the five Roanoke-area sisters pile into one car, a bag full of ham biscuits at the ready.
"By the time we get to the interstate, the biscuits are gone," says Zip, whose real name is Zylpha. When it's time for lunch, they always stop at Cracker Barrel.
"That's the most amazing part about it," Boudreaux says. "They never argue over where to eat or when to eat. And they are always, while they're eating, planning their next meal."
My election day column on Nettie Neighbors, the 73-year-old woman who decided to vote for the first time in her life - before she died - caught the attention of a lot of people. And not for the reason I'd hoped.
"My mother got 30 phone calls," reports Pam Gray, who is Nettie Neighbors' granddaughter. But not the Nettie Neighbors I wrote about.
Gray's grandmother is Nettie G. Neighbors, the former real-estate agent, the former poll worker. Nettie G. is 76. She is not dying.
"Our Nettie is definitely very much alive," Gray says. "She's ornery, too.''
LENGTH: Medium: 96 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: The Crawford sisters - from left and youngest to rightby CNBand oldest: Thelma Holdren, Mildred Humphries, Juanita Murray, Sarah
Switzer, Zip Hambric, Evelyn Kennedy and Cleo Hannah. color.