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Partly cloudy. Low 66F. Winds light and variable.
Bernice Turman will be honored Sunday from 3-5 p.m. at the Christian Valley Christian Church with a 106th birthday celebration.
Bernice Turman enjoys talking about her life on Wednesday at her home in Valley View. She said that she could fill many notebooks with her life story.
Raymond and Bernice Turman shortly before he passed away in 1998. They were happily married for 62 years.
Bernice Harvey at 16-years-old. She said people told her she was so pretty she should become an actress. However, her father said no, she laughed.
Bernice Turman sits at the piano at her home in Valley View. She and her husband Raymond Turman both loved to play. Her husband and his brothers started a quartet, which traveled to different churches and sang, while Bernice played the piano for them.
Bernice Turman will be honored Sunday from 3-5 p.m. at the Christian Valley Christian Church with a 106th birthday celebration.
Bernice Turman enjoys talking about her life on Wednesday at her home in Valley View. She said that she could fill many notebooks with her life story.
Raymond and Bernice Turman shortly before he passed away in 1998. They were happily married for 62 years.
Bernice Harvey at 16-years-old. She said people told her she was so pretty she should become an actress. However, her father said no, she laughed.
Bernice Turman sits at the piano at her home in Valley View. She and her husband Raymond Turman both loved to play. Her husband and his brothers started a quartet, which traveled to different churches and sang, while Bernice played the piano for them.
Bernice Turman delightfully recalled a lifetime of memories, spanning more than a century, on Wednesday afternoon at her home in Valley View as she prepared to celebrate her 106th birthday.
Although Bernice will turn 106 on Monday, August 15, she will be celebrating a little early this year.
According to her daughter-in-law Sharron Turman, Bernice loves the attention, so the family has decided to do something big this year to honor her.
They are hosting a birthday celebration on Sunday from 3-5 p.m. at the Christian Valley Christian Church on Valley Drive in Jonesboro, however, guests are reminded that COVID protocols will apply.
Bernice laughed that she has had a crazy and wonderful life, so she has a lot to celebrate.
She has lived through so much – she was born during World War I, traveled by horse and buggy, survived the Great Depression, fed the soldiers during World War II, performed with a traveling gospel group and so much more.
Plus, she has had the pleasure of watching her family grow and expand over the years, with most of them remaining in the Valley View area, where she has lived for her entire life.
Bernice and her husband Raymond Turman had five children: Mary, Barbara, Billy Ray, Garry and Ronnie.
Bernice also has nine grandchildren, 21 great-grandchildren, and eight great-great-grandchildren.
In fact, Bernice said that she could fill many, many notebooks with her life story.
She was born Edna Bernice Harvey on August 15, 1916, in Marked Tree to her parents Bill and Molly Harvey, shortly before moving to Valley View, seven miles south of Jonesboro.
“When we moved here 105 years ago, it was just a dirt road,” she laughed, noting that she has lived in the same general location for most of her life and has made many fond memories along the way.
Although she noted that she did live with her grandparents, who owned a plantation near Hunter, for a short time as a girl so that she could attend the Ridge Station School, which has long since closed.
However, after a boy, whom her grandfather didn’t approve of, had taken a liking to her, she said her stay with them was cut short and she soon returned to help her father at his store.
Her father owned the W.B. Harvey Mercantile, which was just north of where Bernice lives now and the remnant of the old building still sits on the property.
Bernice said that her father’s store was a staple for the Valley View community in its day.
“Back then everything was sold by the pound,” she noted, as she recalled what an ordeal it was to fill and mark all the bags with grain, sugar, beans or whatever was needed.
She said their store was more than just groceries or goods though, it provided a variety of services from food goods and supplies to funeral services and a mortuary.
Sharron said that Bernice could even recall helping her father pick up the bodies for the funeral home.
Although it was a lot of work, Bernice said it had it rewards, as well.
She spoke of their first television and their first radio player, which ran off large batteries.
“We had to run them off batteries because there was no electricity in our little town yet,” she stated.
She and her father were close, and she said she went everywhere with him.
She laughed as she recalled that she even collected a nickname along the way for being such a good helper, “Tommy Bernice,” which was in reference to her favorite neighbor when she was a girl and also her father’s friend, Tommy Farmer.
She remembers riding their horse and buggy to Jonesboro for supplies.
“We were blessed to have so much,” she smiled as she recalled their wagon with the beautiful linen cover and their horses.
Plus, they owned a farm full of animals and even had a mule, she laughed.
Then she recalled how she loved to take their wagon to the Mount Pisgah Church every Sunday.
In fact, that is how she meet her husband, Raymond Turman.
She recalled how when they were kids, his family and many others would always come over for her mom’s famous Sunday dinners.
She excitedly noted all the delicious food her mother would cook on Sundays including the wonderful pies and cakes.
“After church on Sunday, he would come over with his family,” Bernice smiled.
“We had been fortunate,” she said, recalling the blessings enjoyed by both her family and Raymond’s family. “So, our families would come together and make a big meal for the community.”
Raymond had come from a large family with 11 brothers and one sister she said, noting how close his family was.
Even after his mother got sick and passed away, Raymond still continued to come over on Sundays and began working at the store with her and her father.
She recalled how much help he was around the store and on the farm and how he even made deliveries.
The next thing she knew, Raymond had moved in as one of her father’s workhands.
She and Raymond would soon be married in 1936 and the couple would eventually have five children, although Bernice said she really wanted eight.
When she and Raymond first married, she worked as a waitress and a hostess at the old Hotel Noble in downtown Jonesboro, but would eventually return to take over her father’s store, from which she would eventually retire.
She laughed as she recalled taking over the shop from her father with three children already.
“Can you imagine what it was like running that store with three children,” she said as she recalled Mary and Barbara, who were toddlers at the time, running around her ankles and five-week-old Billy Ray sitting on her hip.
She smiled proudly as she recalled what unique characters her children always were, even though she said the boys all looked identical despite their age differences.
The couple also farmed and raised cattle together, which kept Raymond home during World War ll, when he received a contract to farm for the government.
The couple raised and sold soybeans, cotton and many other vegetables, while also raising livestock such as cows, hogs and chickens.
Plus, they creamed milk and made butter to help feed the soldiers.
“They didn’t have socks or shoes because everything was worn out, so little things like butter meant so much,” she said.
Bernice also reminisced about how they loved church and music, noting that they both could sing and play piano.
So, when he and his brothers started a traveling quartet, which traveled to different churches and sang, Bernice would play for them.
“She has always been active in her community, and she was very active in her church,” Sharron added, noting that her in-laws had been pretty well known back in the ‘50s.
In fact, Raymond would eventually become a church music teacher.
Bernice said God and church has always been an important part of their lives as she recalled a close call they had had when he almost died from a tractor accident many years before his death.
He had been working on his tractor when it accidentally ran him over.
“The tractor had run over his heart,” Bernice recalled, “and the doctors at St. Bernards said that he was going to die. There wasn’t any more they could do.”
So, she called their local pastor, Rex Holt, who came and prayed over him.
To everyone’s surprise Raymond woke up and made a full recovery.
She said he would live many years after the accident.
However, Bernice said the Lord would eventually call him home in 1998, after a nurse’s mistake.
“He was diabetic,” she said sadly. “So, there were certain medicines that he could not take.”
Tears filled the corner of her eyes as she recalled the exact day and time of her husband’s passing at six o’clock on Saturday, January 17, 1998.
The couple’s lifelong best friends Ervin and Irene Glover would then help to keep her company, until he too passed one year to the day of her husband’s death.
After that it was just her and Irene.
Bernice smiled as she talked about how their grandkids would tease them that they should stay home more.
“They’d say look at them crazy old women,” she laughed, noting that they went everywhere together after that, from restaurants to fairs.
Unfortunately, Irene would pass in 2019 at 100-years-old and sadly Bernice’s three sons have also passed, including Sharron’s husband Garry.
Although her parents’ house where she grew up has been torn down for some years now, Bernice still lives in the same house that she and Raymond moved into when they got married.
Sharron noted that her mother-in-law’s house was a lot smaller back then and that they had added on a garage, a large living room and another two bedrooms; but basically, she had been right there since the early 1900s.
According to Sharron, Bernice had many more accomplishments, as she was also a member of the International Order of the Rainbow for Girls and helped run the voting location in south Craighead County for several years.
“Today, besides being a happy and proud grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great grandmother, Bernice still lives on the old homestead and works in her yard,” Sharron stated proudly. “She has always been a good mother-in-law.”
“Bernice is truly a member of the greatest generation of Americans by which all the following generation are measured whether we realize it or not,” she added. “It was people like Bernice who built our communities and continue to shape the America we live in today.”
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