Each year, the Brown County Democrat celebrates some aspect of Brown County history in our Founders Day section. This year we’re writing about residents who are about 80 or older, who have incredible stories to share and who define “Brown County character” in some way or another. If you have a suggestion for a person to feature in the next Founders Day issue, send it to [email protected] or call us at 812-988-2221.

Lois Bond takes a seat at her table facing the window.

This is where she spends most of her time.

“I know what’s going on,” the 85-year-old Brown County resident said.

She’s lived across the street from a school since the early 1960s, watching generations of children and their parents come and go.

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She was born at the fork on Greasy Creek Road. “Bear Wallow goes that way and Greasy Creek goes that way. I was born there in that house,” she said.

She remembers going to school with other well-known residents like Jack McDonald and Jack Altop. The two Jacks sat behind her in grade school at what was then Georgetown School in Bean Blossom. Sylvester Barnes was their teacher.

“I had pigtails and they delighted in doing things,” Bond said of the two boys.

“(One day) an eraser fell on my desk, like to scared me to death. (Mr. Barnes) was throwing it at the Jacks behind me. He could see them in his glasses on the blackboard.”

McDonald drove her and her late husband, Dick, to one of their first dates. Back then, Helmsburg High School juniors and seniors would go out to eat at Boxman’s in Bloomington when they could catch rides.

“You didn’t have no car, didn’t have a way to get anywhere. Dick would walk home,” she said.

She remembers riding in Carl Brummett’s car to school in Bean Blossom with children from at least two other local families.

“The car was full, full. One evening we were coming down Greasy Creek … and we got hung up. We had to walk home in the mud and cold. I can remember how mad mom was because when we got home we were, of course, muddy and it was deep on us. We was a mess. I can remember my mom throwing up her hands,” Bond said.

“We rode with ol’ Carl in a car. That was the only way we had to get to school and back. We didn’t have buses. …We didn’t have cell phones back then to call for help (either).”

When students would forget their lunch, they could walk to the grocery store in Bean Blossom and Herb McDonald — Jack’s father — would give them a bologna sandwich.

“Back then that was a treat, a bologna sandwich. Sylvester (Barnes) used to accuse us of deliberately leaving our lunches at home,” Bond said with a chuckle.

She attended school in Gnaw Bone through the first grade when her family moved to State Road 46 East. That was when her father, Winfer Wilkerson, started working for Brown County State Park.

“Then we moved back to Greasy Creek in the same house. At that time, it was Georgetown, but it’s Bean Blossom now,” Bond said.

She attended school in Bean Blossom for second through fourth grade.

“I would recite with the second grade, go back to my seat and go up and recite with the third grade. Then the next year I would recite with the third grade, go up and recite with the fourth. I took three grades in two years. That made me very young (when I graduated),” she said.

The Wilkerson family moved to Indianapolis when both of her parents began working at Allison Transmission. Bond attended school there until about halfway through her eighth-grade year.

“I can remember the day Franklin Delano Roosevelt died. … I can just remember how devastated I was. I can still feel that, ‘What are we going to do?’ He had been the only president I ever knew. What was I going to do? It’s amazing how you can remember things like that. I met (Dad) when he got off his ride and we had to walk block from his ride to home. … I cried all the way and he kept telling me to ‘be still.’ He wasn’t nearly as upset as I was.”

“That was life back then.”

The family had a pet raccoon named Ike.

“It was my sister’s job to keep him fastened up if we were going somewhere. We went somewhere one day and she didn’t fasten Ike up. When we come home he had just absolutely torn the curtains,” Bond said.

After that, her father sold the raccoon to raccoon hunters so they could teach their dogs how to hunt. With the money, he bought Lois and her sister shoes for school.

The family moved back to Brown County and Bond graduated from Helmsburg High School in 1950 at age 16. She couldn’t find a job right away due to her age. She managed to get one with Bessire Orchard on State Road 135 North.

“I worked over there and had just all kinds of fun. The sale shed was where Al Gott’s (Al’s Paint and Body) is. There was a big log building there and that was their sale shed,” she said.

At 17, Bond got a job at Bridgeport Brass in Indianapolis as a stenographer. She worked there from 1951 until 1953.

In 1953, Dick and Lois were married. That day, rain fell after a long drought. She had planned to walk to the church.

The county had oiled the street where church was just the day before. Her soon-to-be brother-in-law, Dale Bond, carried her to the church so she wouldn’t get her dress or shoes messy.

Dick and Lois met as freshmen in high school, but they didn’t live far from each other either. At the time, her family was on Lick Creek Road.

Besides a trip to Boxman’s, they chatted at school in between classes — sometimes making her a bit late to class — or spent time together at basketball games, the only sport in school.

At one basketball game, Bond said the coach — who was also her government teacher — came up and said he was kicking out of class the next day.

“(Earlier that day in class) we were discussing operettas and operas. He said one thing and I said another. We argued. I said, ‘Well, I’ll prove that I am right, what an operetta was,’” she said.

“He apparently found out from the time class was over with to the ball game that I was right. He was going to kick me out of class because I was right. He was a strange guy.

“We got to class the next day. He said, ‘Anybody in here who doesn’t like it can leave now.’ He looked at me. I didn’t move. He said, ‘Do I have to name names?’ I said, ‘You don’t have to name mine; I’m going.’”

Three other classmates left with her.

The students were going up the steps to the school’s office when they were stopped by another teacher whom she described as “bossy.”

“(She asked) ‘Where are you going?’ (We said) ‘Well, we’ve been kicked out of class.’ She said, ‘That’s what you think.’ She took us right back up, opened the door and said, ‘They’re back,’” she said.

“My mouth used to always get me into trouble. I think I have a grandkid who is the same way, I think, maybe.”

‘One of the kindest’

“I knew what he was going to do and he knew what I was going to do before we done it,” Bond said of her late husband. “It was that kind of connection.”

Dick Bond passed away on Sept. 30, 2013.

“Dick was probably one of the kindest. It took an awful lot to make him mad. I can’t say if I had ever seen him really, really mad. When I think about it, I just can’t see him ever mad enough to throw anything,” Lois said.

“He didn’t stick his nose in anybody else’s business. He kept to himself.

“But I always said if Dick and I had any trouble or got a divorce, my mom would take Dick’s side,” Lois said with a laugh.

During the blizzard of 1978, Dick walked from their home on Helmsburg School Road through a field to check on her mom who lived on Lick Creek Road.

“That’s just the kind of person that he was,” she said.

Dick loved to coach baseball and softball. “I said if I had an nickel for every hour I sat on the bleachers I’d be wealthy,” she said.

The couple have always been members of the Democratic Party. Dick Bond served as precinct chairman from 1969 — when he took over after Lois’ father passed away — until just a few months before his own passing.

Bond left her job at Bridgeport Brass when she was about 21. Then, Dick went into the service. He served with the 6th Armored Division, 93rd AFA Battalion in Germany from August 1954 to July 1956. He was discharged from active service after receiving a Good Conduct medal and a Germany Army Occupation medal, according to newspaper archives. Lois said he served with the medics in the Army.

Dick went to work for Chevrolet for the next 41 years before retiring.

While Dick was away, Lois went to work for the telephone company as a service representative in Nashville. She worked there until her second daughter, Mindy, was born in 1958.

While working there she remembers seeing a young Andy Rogers going into the bank every morning.

“I never seen him in a suit and tie. He was Andy whether you’ve seen him or not. It’s a shame we don’t have more people like Andy,” she said.

“The death of Andy Rogers is going to be a lot worse than people realize. A lot of people had no idea what all Andy has done for Brown County.”

Brown County is home

Bond also worked at Indiana University in the audio-visual department before taking a job as the deputy assessor for 16 years.

“There wasn’t any technology then. … The trustees did the assessing. At that time they went out and measured a house. They brought it in and we priced them. … We handled estates and that type of stuff,” she said.

During her time working in the assessor’s office, Bond was in a car crash and she broke her neck. “That’s the reason I’m in the shape I am,” she said.

“They brought my work home and I sat right in there and done it. It was either that or it didn’t get done.”

She left the assessor’s office in 1986 and Dick retired in 1991. But the couple didn’t stop working.

In 1989, they won a bid to run the concession stands in the Brown County State Park. They did that for eight years.

The couple’s two youngest children, Amy and Rick, helped run concessions at the pool and the campground store. They were open from the last weekend of March until the first weekend of November.

“Let me tell you that is a job and a half. It’s on cement floor … no air conditioning, nothing in that little old building. Campers, a lot of them were very demanding; a lot of them were lovely people,” she said.

“It was fun, we enjoyed it, but let me tell ya, if you went to work during the busy season, we opened up at 8 every morning on Saturday and Sunday, then closed at 9 at night. We were there for over 12 hours,” she said.

“By 9 o’clock you were really dragging, but then you couldn’t get out of there at 9 o’clock because you had to close out. They always had hay rides, so you had to wait until the last hay ride come in because all those people wanted something to drink before they went back. But it was really, really fun.”

She remembers a little boy from Chicago standing around when she got out of her car one morning at the store.

“It had stormed. There was a little boy about 10 or 12. ‘Shhh,’ he said to me when I got out of the car. I said, ‘What’s a matter?’

“‘Listen,’ he said. ‘You don’t hear anything. I’m from Chicago and I’ve never heard quiet before.’ Then there was a rainbow and he had never seen a rainbow. He said, ‘I’ve heard about them, but I’ve never seen them.’”

After eight years running concessions, the couple officially retired.

Nowadays, Bond doesn’t drive. She broke her ankle in 2013 and hasn’t driven since.

She keeps busy reading People magazine, local newspapers and books she receives as part of a book club or from friends.

After all these years, she has no desire to live anywhere else.

“Everybody runs off to Florida. I have no desire to go to Florida, none. Brown County is home,” she said.

“I guess I am one of these people, I lived in Indianapolis for four or five years, that was long enough.”

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Age: 85

Place of birth: Greasy Creek Road

Spouse: Richard “Dick” Bond, deceased

Children: Shirley, Mindy, Rick and Amy

Parents: Winfer and Goldie Wilkerson

Siblings: Three brothers and two sisters

Occupations: Bessire’s Orchard; stenographer at Bridgeport Brass; service representative for the phone company in Nashville; Indiana University in the audio visual department; deputy county assessor; state park concessions and camp store manager.

Hobbies: Reading, cooking, baking and spending time with family.

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