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Ebb, Birdie Hall celebrate 75th wedding anniversary

By Rose Hooper
Ebb and Birdie Hall - circa 1951

Pictured in front of Velt's Cafe in 1951, Ebb and Birdie Hall participated in the celebrate of Jackson County's Centennial.

Ebb and Birdie Hall will celebrate their 75th wedding anniversary Sunday, Nov. 12. In all these years of being married, they've never taken a honeymoon.

Birdie was a young thing of 15 when she and Ebb, much older at 21, slipped off in an old T-model Ford to be married by a justice of the peace in Bryson City on Nov. 12, 1925.

"My mom and dad like to have cried their eyes out when I told them I wanted to get married - that's why we had to slip off," said Birdie, formerly a Buchanan.

After they were married, the newlyweds went to Ebb's parents' house. "I went home the very next day," said Birdie, "to get some clothes," she added after realizing how that sounded.

Ebb, who described his wife as a "pretty thing back then," still considers her pretty at 90. She's still trim, energetic, takes care with her appearance and can warm your heart with her ready smile.

Ebb courted her for a year at her Greens Creek home before asking her to become his bride.

"She was a good hand to work," Ebb said, describing one of the traits that made him decide to pop the question.

Ebb and Birdie Hall - circa 2000

Married Nov. 12, 1925, Ebb and Birdie Hall will celebrate their 75th wedding anniversary this Sunday.

Times were hard back then, the Halls agreed, and being a good worker was important. Birdie managed the Park Edge Pure Oil Station in Savannah community, selling gas, groceries, dry goods and feed. She'd go in to work at 5 a.m. and still be going strong at midnight.

From the front porch of their house, located on Weldon Hall Road, Birdie can look out at the wood frame building that used to serve as the gas station. A glance in the other direction gives her a clear view of Top Cats Grocery.

"She hasn't changed a bit," said her daughters, Gladys and Geneva Estes, who married brothers. "She can't sit still, and she still works circles around us."

Meanwhile, Ebb worked for WPA, cut cord wood, logged a lot, "rolled 'em out" at the copper mines at Windy Gap and, after all that, retired from Sylco Corp. where he was a night watchman for 16 years.

Birdie raised her girls with "equal rights" long before the ERA. Gladys could drive a log truck better than any man, her mother proudly tells folks.

Although he's on an oxygen machine, Ebb is pretty healthy otherwise. At 96, he still eats the three meals a day that Birdie cooks for him. "She's the best cook," admitted Ebb, who's partial to beef and "those big, handmade biscuits."

Although times have been hard, the couple said their life together has been happy. "We know dad's happy, 'cause he sings all the time," Gladys said.

The secret to that happiness, Birdie said, is "keeping a good home together." Ebb said the secret is "being good to one another." Too many marriages now end in divorce, he said, "because they don't have enough love when they marry."

"He's been a pretty good husband," Birdie said of her husband. "Only the last 15 years he gave up on me," she grinned, almost hinting she was referring to the intimate side of their marriage.

"She still tries to get me to work - like wash the dishes and peel apples," Ebb, the oldest deacon at Old Savannah Baptist Church, let it be known.

Daughters Gladys and Geneva and son Weldon all agree, "They've been the very best parents... wish we could raise our families as good as they raised us." The couple has 10 grandchildren, 16 great-grandchildren and nine great-great-grandchildren.

Back to Archive: 11/09/00.