Bridges, Reed - Biography

George Reed Bridges was born on 21 April 1912, the son of Joseph Henderson Bridges and Ada Alma Hufstedler. He was born in rural Dyer County Tennessee, near Newbern. He was born in a farming family and didn't attend school beyond grammar school (according to the army enlistment records). They always lived around the Newbern area.

Allie Mai Chapman was born on 01 May 1919, in Newbern, Dyer County, Tennessee. She was the daughter of Ruben Acie Chapman and Ora Bell Howell. Interestingly, her birth certificate and early documents indicate her name as "Allie Mai". Later in life, it was always spelled as "Allie Mae". I'm not sure how Reed and Allie Mai might have met. Reed was Baptist and Allie Mai was Church of Christ, so it's likely they didn't meet at church.

It seems the Chapman's lived in Newbern for most of her childhood, until November 1934 when the family moved to Rives, Obion County, Tennessee, about 25 miles away. Just a few days after they moved, Allie Mai and Reed were married in Obion County, Tennessee on 16 Nov 1934. I wonder if they had planned to get married before they moved, or Allie Mai consented to be married because she was mad about moving? Reed's residence was listed as Route 1 in Newbern and Allie Mai's was listed as RFD 1 in Rives, Tennessee. Reed was 22 years old and Allie Mae was just 15. According to Allie Mae in 1995, she said that after they were married, they moved in with his parents. At that time, Joseph, Ada, son Vernon, daughter Vernell, daughter Edith, daughter Gladys & her 2 children, and son Claude all lived in their house in Dyer County. The house had 2 front rooms, a kitchen and a side room. So in this little house, there now lived 11 people. After a while, Reed and Allie Mai moved to their own place. They borrowed $50 to move out. They had a dresser, bed, cook stove and table and a couple chairs. Reed worked for $1 per day working on this man's farm. They lived down by the barn.

In 1936, their first child was born at Newbern. The doctor was so drunk that Allie Mai's parents, Ruben & Ora Chapman, came over to help with the delivery. He was so drunk that he got the baby's name wrong. According to the daughter, "Mamma didn't want me to go through life as Bertha Irene so she made the doctor cross it out and write it correctly." One of Allie Mai's brothers wrote this note about the birth. "I got to thinking about it and realized I was only 11 yrs old when you were born, I vividly remember that night. We had just moved to Weakley County and Mama and Daddy had gone to Newbern to be with Allie Mae for your birth. Being at a new place, we thought we heard someone at the barn, probably stealing corn. My brother got the rifle and shot a couple of times in the air and at bedtime, we loaded the rifle and put it on a chair beside the bed. We slept in Mama and Daddy’s bed. Daddy came in during the night and got in bed with us and we did not know it until we woke the next morning. That rifle sure did protect us. Ha!”

In 1938, Reed and Allie Mai applied for a social security account. At the time, they were living on South Monroe Street in Newbern. Reed was unemployed and Allie Mai was working at Morris Manufacturing Company in Newbern.

About 1940, they moved to Chicago. By 1941 they were living at 2316 Lincoln Avenue in Chicago. One sister remembers living in a large apartment building on the third floor. "Once there was a fire in the building. My sister and I were thrown from the window to the firefighters net below and Mother and Daddy climbed down the firefighter’s ladder." One sister remembers the birth of the third sister. "It was my 2nd sister's and my job to watch our 3rd sister. I remember once when she was a baby, she was on the bed and rolled off the bed toward the wall. There was a radiator next to the bed and she burned her arm very badly. Mother was livid with us for letting her get hurt, so I guess we were not the best baby sitters in the world."

But by 1944, they had moved back to Tennessee and were living in Huntingdon. In 1945, Reed enlisted in the army and was involved in World War 2. According to Allie Mae, Reed and his brother Vernon were cooks. The war ended and the military sent their ship directly to Tokyo. So their ship was the first ship to land at Tokyo. For more information about his war service, click here.

After Reed went into the army, Allie Mae and the kids lived in a rundown shack down the road from grandmother. One night during a bad electrical storm, lightening hit the house and it caught on fire. After that, they moved in with Grandmother and Granddaddy. (Ora & Ruben Chapman). The oldest daughter remembers trying to go to school at that time. "It was very hard for me at that time to go to school. When I left Chicago, I was in the second half of the 2^nd grade. However, in Tennessee, they did not have divisions of the grades and they put me in the 3^rd grade. It was difficult for me to try to understand the teachers because of the accent. The bus stop was about a mile from the house and I would walk down the road to the bus stop but turn around and go back home because I did not want to go. Mother finally had to walk with me to the bus and wait until I got on. Of course, I failed the grade and had to take it again. A year later Mother let my sister and me go to a country one-room school. It is pretty interesting going to school with only about 20 students and grades one thru eight in one room. We did not go there more than a few months before we were back to taking the bus to the town school." The second daughter remembers walking that mile to the bus stop. It was a long walk. Remember, the two oldest girls would have only been about 8 and 6 years old. They walked in all kinds of weather and girls back then didn't wear pants. She also remembers that walk to the bus because of all the honeysuckle that grew along the road. Even now, every time she smells honeysuckle, she thinks of that walk to the bus.

Their second daughter remembers the day he came back. "There was a big pot or bucket. Mother was washing my hair in the bucket." The oldest daughter remembers when Reed got back from the war, "When Daddy got home from the Army, Granddaddy sold him the farm (100 acres) and they moved to another farm. (I think Granddaddy moved Grandmother every year or just about of their married life) Our farm was on a gravel road back in the poorest part of the county. It was mostly black families with a few white families scattered here and there. " They lived in this house until about the summer of 1950. This was the white house in Huntingdon. There's a picture of this house on the main page. 2 of the sisters visited the farm in 2003. According to one, "The pear tree is still there - it was there when we were growing up. Mother used to make jams and jellies and preserves. The apple tree is gone. When Mother was still alive, we visited the old farm and the well was capped at that point in time. But by the time we visited it again in 2003, we couldn't find the well at all. We had a swing on one of the trees and you can still see the chain hanging."

The oldest daughter remembers, "Mother and Daddy’s best friends were Lou Willie and Horace Rumley. We loved them like family and Mother kept in touch with Lou Willie until she died. We were all so poor that we had no indoor plumbing or electricity. Daddy used to catch squirrels and rabbits for us to eat for dinner. Lou Willie made possum stew but I am not sure if Mother ever made it or not." (There's a picture of Horace & Lou Willie on the main page). Even after they moved to Chicago later and then came back to McKenzie, the family still kept touch with Horace and Lou Willie. Whenever the families went back to Tennessee for a family reunion or to just visit, they always had a wienie roast out at "Harce and Willy's" (as I always thought their name was, based on how people pronounced it.)

After the 4th daughter was born, the oldest sister remembers, "Daddy saw that he could not take care of the farm alone, so we sold everything and moved to Chicago. Daddy came up early and found an apartment and a job and then our uncle moved us up in his pick-up. Talk about the Beverly Hillbillies. Here we are driving on Lake Shore Drive in a pickup with everything we owned tied on it and my sisters nad I on the back of the truck with our feet dangling over. I am surprised we are even alive."

When they moved back to Chicago in 1950, they lived upstairs of a tavern in an apartment on Leavitt, Montrose and Lincoln Avenues. The oldest sister remembers, "Aunt Nell and Uncle RB helped Daddy find an apartment over a tavern on a busy corner. He bought all the furniture from the owner and we were so excited because we had a TV and a telephone. Our very first and this was in 1950. The noise from the street and the smell of the tavern was something that took forever to get used to. There was a big kitchen, a dining room, a living room and 3 bedrooms. It was at the corner of Lincoln, Montrose and Leavitt. The Lincoln Avenue streetcars were being changed to buses and it was pretty noisy because they were tearing up the street and taking out the tracks. This was a big culture shock for us. I am not joking when I say we never wore shoes except in the winter and I think I may never get my feet clean. To this day, I love to go without shoes. I guess once a hillbilly always a hillbilly. However, Mother always got so upset with me when I called us a hillbilly because she said we were Southerners not hillbillies."

There was a grocery store and a drugstore across the street and on the opposite corner there was a snack shop (which actually turned out to be a lot of fun). There was also a bakery next to the grocery store. The oldest sister remembers, "Mother usually did the shopping but when she got pregnant again in 1952, the only time she went out of the house was to go to the Doctor. The shopping then fell onto us girls. My two younger sisters, did most of it since I was usually at work."

Another place they lived in was a store-front apartment. A sister remembers, "the windows in the front, which were originally for a store, and now we lived there. It always felt like we were going to the store when we went into the apartment. I am not sure exactly where it was but it had to be close to Children’s Memorial Hospital because that is where we went to get all of our medical attention. We went to the clinic there because Mother and Daddy never had money to go to the doctor’s office. And I do remember it was close to Waller High School. "

Another of their houses was at 2154 W. Montrose Avenue. One of Allie Mae's jobs was working at a bakery down the street. Two sisters remember stopping by the bakery after school and Mother would give them a sweet roll. The oldest sister also remembers another place they lived. "Once again the family “home” was involved in a fire. One day when we were coming home from school, we saw the fire trucks at the corner and as we got closer I heard someone say, “It is in the hillbilly’s apartment.” I am not sure which hurt worse, the words or having another fire. Fortunately it was the space heater and there was no damage to the apartment."

In the fall of 1962, they moved back to Tennessee. They bought a house on a hill on the old Greenfield Highway. (see picture on the main page). Then in January 1963, they moved to a house at 414 Elm Street in McKenzie. Reed and his brother-in-law Ernest Kee bought the store by the railroad tracks at the same time. Because he was dealing with food, he had to get a chest x-ray (perhaps they were looking for tuberculosis). That was when they found a spot on his lung. That was March 1963. He had his lung operated on in April 1963 to take the spot out in the Veteran's Hospital in Memphis. Then he had radiation treatments, but he never recovered. He died at his house in September 1963. At this same time, the youngest son ran out in front of a car and his leg was broken. They put him in the Baptist hospital in Memphis. They had to put a pin in his leg. Allie Mae was absolutely exhausted running back and forth between the hospitals. She had such a hard life, but never complained.

Allie Mae stayed in their house on Elm Street after his death and continued to raise the 2 youngest children as a single mother. In 1984, she moved to another house in McKenzie. There she stayed until her death. She died on 14 March 1997. Both she and Reed are buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery in McKenzie.

They had 5 children, but this information is not listed here. Information on living persons is suppressed. Other memories from their children are recorded below:

Memories of the farm

Memories of the city