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Lifelong friends look back eight decades
Rachel Phillips and Hattie Hilda Allison have been friends for as long as they can remember – or at least as long as Rachel remembers.
According to Hattie Hilda, Rachel recalls the eight-plus decades the two have known each other in a lot more detail.
“Sometimes I think she remembers things that didn’t happen,” Hattie Hilda said last week. “She can tell me where I went and what I was wearing and I don’t know a thing about it.”
Hattie Hilda Allison, left, and Rachel Phillips of Sylva have been friends for more than eight decades. In the top photo, taken in 1997, they are at their Sylva High School Class of 1937’s 60th reunion. In the lower photo, taken around 1935, the two teenagers were part of a church group at Ridgecrest.
Both will celebrate their 87th birthdays this year, with Rachel reaching four score and seven on Friday, and Hattie Hilda to follow on May 5.
“We’ve known each other since the beginner class at First Baptist, and we’ve never exchanged a cross word,” Rachel said.
After all these years, they still have plenty to talk about. Sitting in Hattie Hilda’s living room Friday, it was hard to break into the conversation long enough to turn them back to their girlhood in Sylva during the 1920s and 1930s. However, once the two got started, the stories came out in a flood.
“We were the meanest good girls in Sylva,” Rachel said.
“But we never broke the law,” Hattie Hilda said.
Listening to their tales was like having old newspapers come to life. Because Jonah Dills (Sylva Fire Department founder), Bart Cope (famous fire chief) and Gertrude Dills McKee (North Carolina’s first woman state senator) figure in the stories, these Sylva legends become more than names on a page in the history book.
Rachel Brown was born in a house that once stood in what is presently Moody’s Funeral Home parking lot and grew up on Rose Street; Hattie Hilda Sutton lived on the other side of town in what is now Luther and Barbara Osment’s home above Jackson Street, which was accessed by climbing 49 steps that led from the sidewalk up to the house.
“If I had a dollar for every time I climbed those steps, I’d be rich,” Rachel said.
The two are quick with praise for each other.
“She was the pretty one,” Hattie Hilda said.
“She was the friendly, witty one,” Rachel said. “Whenever she left the house, her mother would say ‘Don’t forget to come home.’ Wherever she was at mealtimes, that’s where she ate.”
One reason their friendship has been so successful and long-lasting seems to be that the two have always complemented each other rather than competing against one another.
“She played basketball and I was the manager,” Hattie Hilda said.
“She taught me to knit and I taught her to drive,” Rachel said.
Before Rachel could teach Hattie Hilda, she first taught herself to drive. One day when she was about 15, she and Hattie Hilda decided to take Rachel’s mother’s car and pick her up because it was raining. When they got to Main Street, they picked up Rachel’s cousins, Madge and Andy Wilson instead.
“By the time we got to Mill Street, we saw smoke,” Rachel said. “We didn’t know people used to drain the water out of the radiator and then fill it up when they were going to use the car.”
From then on, if she had gas (that was during the Depression), Rachel drove.
“My mother never said a word and never asked for the key,” Rachel said. “In those days you didn’t need a driver’s license.”
Before that, they roller-skated around town. One year Rachel’s mother, who owned The Ruralite, gave the list of those who were behind in subscription payments and said she’d give the girls half of what they collected.
“We skated all over – out to Maple Springs and Beta,” Rachel said. “We earned $25, and that was a lot of money then.”
Another favorite activity was going to fires.
“When the fire whistle blew, we took off,” Rachel said. “Sometimes we got there before the fire trucks. I remember going to fires in Possum Holler and on Wilkesdale.”
Still vivid in both their memories is an August 1934 Girl Scout trip to Carolina Beach.
“We sold things to raise the money to go,” Rachel said. “I sold a pig.”
Docia Garrett was their leader, and the girls traveled across the state in the back of an open truck with benches lining both sides that belonged to George and Fred Brown from Caney Fork. The group left Main Street’s Carolina Hotel (Simply Elegant and Main Design are located on the ground floor of the old hotel) at 7 a.m. and arrived at their destination at 9 p.m. that night.
“None of us had ever seen the ocean,” Rachel said.
They also remember the pageants that were part of their childhood summers.
“Ladies would come and put on shows,” Hattie Hilda said. “They’d bring trunks full of pretty costumes.”
Decades later, Hattie Hilda can describe some of the outfits while Rachel remembers one or two of the songs. The pageants were fund-raisers for the fire department, Rachel said.
Hattie Hilda also remembers a women’s club-sponsored fashion show where she wore a dress she had made.
“I could sew,” she said. “I made Rachel and me two or three dresses just alike. One time I made blue dresses and monogrammed our initials on the pockets.”
As little girls, Rachel and Hattie Hilda saw each other mostly at church.
“I was there every time they rang the bell, and she was, too,” Rachel said.
The Baptist Church figures in a lot of their stories. Like the time they thought they’d scare the preacher’s wife by sneaking to the parsonage at night and scratching on the screen. Hattie Hilda remembers that they almost got shot that time, but Rachel says they got a warning that they might get shot if they didn’t stop pulling such pranks. In another story, they tell of walking into Black Mountain during a stay at Ridgecrest (the Baptist assembly) so they could get kerosene for the lamps. They didn’t need the lights to see to read or sew, they wanted the fuel so they could heat up their curling irons in the lamp’s flame.
The young friends were briefly separated when they started school. Rachel began her education at Sylva Elementary, and Hattie Hilda went to Sylva Collegiate Institute, a Baptist boarding school located on the hill behind the Verizon building (That area is still known as “College Hill,” despite the fact that SCI closed in 1932) for the first three grades. The two paired up for good in fourth grade when Hattie Hilda switched to public school. Several other Sylva girls were part of their group – Elsie (Geisler) Massie, who still lives in town; Edith (Garrett) Jenkins of Black Mountain; and Kitty Dean (McGuire) Gamewell of Murfreesboro, Tenn. They graduated from high school in 1937 and hope to gather with their classmates in April for a 69th reunion.
Reminiscing about their school days reminded Rachel and Hattie Hilda about an April Fool’s Day trick their senior class played. They all went to school (old Sylva High School in Mark Watson Park) that day knowing they weren’t going to stay. The students went to home room, but when the bell rang for their first class, the seniors walked down the hall, out the school door and up a trail to the Courthouse. From there they walked to the head of Fisher Creek and climbed the Pinnacle, arriving at the summit in time to eat the lunches they’d packed.
“We were really tired when we got back – it was 16 or 17 miles,” Rachel said.
“I’m still tired,” Hattie Hilda said. “And when I got back to town, I had to climb those 49 steps to my house.”
Describing that long-ago escapade brought smiles to the faces of the longtime sidekicks.
“Young people do different things now, but I doubt they enjoy them as much as we did,” Hattie Hilda said. “We did things and made our fun and got a kick out of doing it.”
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