In spite of all the family obligations, Maud found time to help neighbors when they were in need. Clelan remembers that she was especially sympathetic to women who were left widowed with children to raise. "Aunt" Velda was married to my father’s (Earl Stuart) brother Lawrence (Lon) Stuart until he died in 1918. Letha Stuart Crow remembers that her mother was teaching the "Martin School" soon after her father died and they would sometimes spend the night with the Martins if the weather was too bad. Once the weather was bad but Aunt Velda needed to go home anyway and she left Letha (maybe four years old) to stay with the Martins. Letha remembers that she really admired Cloyse who was a few years older. When it came time to go to bed she insisted that she wanted to sleep with Cloyse and at first would not be dissuaded. Finally Myrtle and Lorene "bribed" her with chewing gum to sleep with them instead. Everybody was happy – until the next morning when the gum was firmly stuck to Letha’s hair!
Another example of Maud’s desire to help a woman in need was when she asked Alice Berry to come and stay with her to help out some of the time when Maud was having a baby or in poor health. Alice had given birth to an infant out of wedlock and was somewhat ostracized in the community and treated badly even by her father. Maud’s acceptance of her helped her to "come out of her shell" and live a more normal life, eventually marrying and being a good neighbor to Maud.
Some of the stories they tell about their childhood make me wonder why Grandma only had one health breakdown! Maud ordered overall fabric in such quantity that she earned a premium large enough to order a coaster wagon, a red wagon with side boards. The boys would push the smaller boys in the wagon in a circle around the porch that ran around the house. There were wash tubs set on the low side of the house to catch the rain water. They were several feet below the floor of the porch at that point.
The boys pushed Raymond in the wagon as fast as possible around and around until finally the wagon skidded and dumped Raymond and the wagon into the washtubs full of water!
They didn’t have any passive children. They were always investigating and learning about how things worked. As they became more affluent, they started to get some conveniences – a kerosene refrigerator and a gasoline powered washing machine. The boys were fascinated. They were watching the agitator and got to wondering how powerful it was. Clelan and Raymond were teenagers with powerful muscles from all the work lifting and working with lumber and they were able to hold the agitator and stall the motor. Hoyle, a few years younger, was frustrated because he couldn’t do it, so he got the idea of bracing his arm against the side of the tub — and broke his arm! He wouldn’t cry because he knew he shouldn’t have been playing with it, but Myrtle examined it and declared it broken. A washing machine should have been an unmitigated blessing, but even that caused a problem!
Hoyle tells of an experiment he and Raymond did using a fire under a syrup bucket to produce steam to power a wheel’s turning. They used a tooth pick stuck in a hole in the bucket as a safety valve. It worked fine at first, but as the wooden toothpick got wet it expanded and failed to pop out. The steam blew the lid off the bucket and the steam covered Raymond’s face in an instant. It must have been extremely painful, but Raymond’s first thought was not the pain, but whether their Dad would know what they had been doing, so he immediately said, "How do I look?" At that moment the skin just peeled from his face. It is amazing that there was no permanent scarring. It must have taken nerves of steel to survive as the mother with things like that going on all around you.