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- [S4] Knoxville News-Sentinel (Tennessee), 5 Mar 2006.
DYKES, ELSA CHAMBERS - age 96 of Alcoa, died at 10:30 a.m., Tuesday, February 28, 2006 at Transitional Care Center, Maryville, of liver cancer, the symptoms of which arose about six weeks prior. Her husband, Boone Dykes, son of Rev. James Robert Dykes and Margaret Orleans Creswell Dykes, died in 1965. She was the third child (of 11) born to James Phillip Chambers and Zora Melvina Collins in a house at Chambers Creek, in Swain County, North Carolina, built by her father—"after the barn was built." A spring branch rose behind the house and ran through the yard. Social life on Chambers Creek consisted of going to the Baptist Church and to baptizings. (In the creek, usually where it flowed into the Little Tennessee River.) She and her slightly older sister, Ethel, decided to baptize their mother's chickens in the spring branch. "We baptized all we could catch," she said. "Once was usually enough. They learned to run from us." She said that if you lived on Chambers Creek and weren't Baptist, you were considered "quare-turned." She said, "The Kirkland cousins moved up from Bryson City and they were Methodists." Parents entertained children. Her mother sang Celtic laments of death and heartbreak, blood and treachery. "Dad," she said, "was more for the silly, funny, songs." The first trip she remembered was standing with her siblings, on a rock sled built by her father, drawn by oxen he had broken to harness, going to Bushnell, or perhaps Bryson City. Her last memorable trip (other than going to North Carolina to see new great-grandchildren) was a board a jet with her younger sister, Marian and her husband, Charles Harrison, and fly to Seattle, Washington, and Vancouver, B.C., and take a cruise ship to Alaska. She was about 90. Every child in her Chambers Creek School (which was also a church, community club, funeral parlor and social center) was a cousin. Her father said, "I'll not have my children marrying their cousins, and they are going to go to college. They moved across the mountain to Blount County in 1918. None married a cousin and all, except the two who died young, went to college. James Chambers was a drover for the herds of cattle brought from the North Carolina Mountains to the railhead in Tennessee. He, and others, would stay overnight at the home of a cousin, Becky Cable, in Cades Cove, on the drive. In Maryville he took a nickel and went to a moving picture show. "He came home quite impressed," his daughter said. Later, like his in-law, Rev. Bob Dykes, he decided moving pictures were not Baptist-kosher. But he did contest to see "Gone With The Wind." Zora Collins Chambers' grandfather, Alfred Cline, served in the Civil War in the Thomas Indian Brigade and was assassinated on his front porch when he returned. Probably one of the red-headed Kirkland cousins, some of whom spent the war year at home, robbing, pillaging, burning barns and stealing cattle and grain. (Much of it Alfred Cline's, a preemptive strike, as it were.) When they came to Tennessee they went first to Harry Proffitt's farm where the airport is now sited. They wound up at the ALCOA farm on McArthur Road. Elsa went to Everett High School where she played basketball and, at 16, began a not always smooth courtship with Boone Dykes. They married when they were 23. They went to Townsend where Boone's oldest sister, Miss Flo Dew, was a railroad executive and ran the hotel for Little River Lumber Co. (She was married to an engineer, Woody Dew, who she fired at least once.) Boone and Elsa had a son, James Robert in 1933, and a daughter, Eleanor Flo, in 1935. Elsa boarded during the week in Dry Valley with the Dunns (in-laws) and taught at the one-room Red Bank School—mostly little Shulers, Efflers, Skidmores, and Sullivans. She would ride in from Townsend on Monday morning with Jake Farmer, dairyman, and ride back Friday afternoons in the A-Model coupe with her husband and two children. Sometimes she took her three-to-four year-old son who could be induced to sing for the older children (with a perfect ear for volume and somewhat dubious harmonics.) Later in the 30's she moved to Townsend Elementary School. In 1944 they moved to Alcoa where she taught over 30 years at Springbrook and her husband worked for ALCOA. She was a member of Alcoa First Baptist Church but stopped attending when, several years ago, the Southern Baptist Association set about purging "moderate" preachers and professors, decided the Bible was absolutely inerrant, that the head of the SBA was more infallible than the Pope, and decided the Baptist women would be much better Christians if they sat down, shut up, and obeyed their husbands. Her conduct, her diet, and her religion were austere to the point of being ascetic. She was thoroughly conventional and a strict enforcer of the rules—many of which she made up as she went along. She was prreceded in death by siblings Oscar, Ethel (Holloway), Viola (Herrick), Vega (Burns), Arnold, Rena (Swift), Ivan, Mary Evelyn (who died as an infant and Norman (who died at 20.) Her daughter, Eleanor Flo, died in 1996. She leaves her son, Jim Dykes, Rockford, and youngest sister, Marian Harrison, Maryville. She was 18 and a senior at Everett when her youngest sister was born. "We all took care of the babies and Marian was mine," Elsa said. Marian wept bitterly when Elsa married Boone Dykes. "I knew I was losing my 'mama,'" she said. Boone and Elsa "ran off" to Clinton to marry, attended by his sister, Georgia, and her husband, Barney Ballard. She also leaves grandchildren, Mrs. Warren (Heather Patterson) Earl, and Eric Patterson, both of Charlotte, North Carolina five Dykes grandchildren, Katy, Kelly, Bob, David, and Sally. They all live around here except for David who teaches at the University of New Orleans when it is not under water great grandchildren are Ethan and Joel Patterson, Eric and Rebeccah's boys, and James R. (Jade) Dykes and Mrs. James (Jennifer Dykes) Stamper, Bob's kids. Great great grandchildren are Michael and Jacob Stamper, fondly known as the hell-imps, and Isabell Stamper, due for debut any moment and "the sooner the better," according to her mother, Jennifer. Isabell's iron willed great great grandmother held on for several days, waiting for Isabell, but finally had to turn loose. She also leaves God knows how many cousins and nieces and nephews and grand nieces and nephews and on and on, many close by and others scattered from hell to breakfast. When she died a library, with many volumes of Appalachian folk history, burned down, to paraphrase Alex Haley and we shall not see her like again, to paraphrase Shakespeare. Even individually, she and her daughter-in-law, Peggy Elaine Booker Dykes, were not always rational observers of Pat Summitt's Lady Vols. Together, they turned into a two-woman lynch mob. Given her sister, Marian's, joining them, males considered it safer out on the porch. Many believe that, even gone on, they are keeping a hot, beady, eye on tournament season. She went to Maryville College in an era when referees were more tolerant of physical confrontation. Girls playing for rival colleges were sometimes "maimed" as we would say today. Sixty-two years later, in answer to a timid and diffident question, she said, "We wanted to WIN!" At Alcoa, high school girls-faculty basketball game, the girls learned quickly that it might be safer to give "Mrs. Dykes-46-year-old-teacher" some room when she decided she wanted a rebound or a layup. No Alcoa girls were maimed. At the University of Tennessee, after her children were grown, she did a paper on Sir Thomas More. She got her "A" and one of those sheepskins, but was as emotionally involved with "The Perfect Knight" as she was with James Buchanan or James Knox Polk. Sir Thomas More and his virtues passed, unmourned, into that golden haze of misty memories. When the Chambers family moved to Tennessee Elsa's grandmother Collins and grandfather had established a general store on Harper Avenue in Maryville. In 1923, when she was 13 or 14, women won the franchise. She marched, with her grandmother Collins, to the polls and watched her grandmother vote. When she was 21 a Republican came and got her and took her to the polls where she voted Democrat. " I said, " 'Thank you very much,' when I got out at home," she said. Memorial services-with Bible verses, music, singing(no dancing) laughing, crying, Baptist wine, casseroles, ham, biscuits, and unbaptized chicken, will be announced later, when the tribe can be rounded up. Donations may be sent to the American Cancer Society, 871 Weisgarber Road, Knoxville, Tennessee, 37909. Arrangements by Cremation Options, Inc. (865) 6WE-CARE (693-2273) www.cremationoptionsinc.com
- [S1] U. S. Social Security Death Index, 413-72-6652.
Issued in Tennessee, residing in Alcoa, Blount County, Tennessee
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1909 - 2006 (96 years)