About 20 years ago, when the Internet was in its infancy in these parts, Betty Armstreet Sparrow joined a Yahoo on-line craft club and met a woman in Hannibal, Missouri, named Jackie. The two became best friends.
Sparrow, who grew up in West Point, was living in Germantown, Tennessee, where she was a manager at a Kroger store and taught ceramics at a community arts center at night.
Despite a separation of 400 miles, Betty and Jackie’s friendship flourished.
“We would put our computers on VOICE and she might be crocheting and I might be sewing,” said Betty. “Every time I got a vacation, I’d head north and spend a week (with her).”
Betty didn’t know much about Jackie’s husband Roger, who worked night shift at a tire factory and wasn’t around much during their visits.
Jackie died with cancer in 2010. A year later Roger phoned Betty. Not long after that they were married. That they have been compatible should come as no surprise; after all they both loved Jackie.
The year Jackie died, Betty, wanting to get out of Memphis, asked Kroger for a store closer to home. The company transferred her to Starkville and she bought a house on Hazelwood Road north of West Point.
Betty and Roger Sparrow live there now, a small, attractive dark brown board and batten house near the end of a long gravel driveway. In the backyard Roger has a workshop where he sometimes does small engine repair. East of the house is a massive willow oak. “My Mama believes that tree was here when Jesus walked the Earth,” said Betty.
Tuesday afternoon Roger, Betty and I sat on their front porch and talked while their three dogs, Mattie Lou, Casey Mae and Booger Butt lay sprawled at Roger’s feet.
I met the Sparrows two weeks ago at the Cotton District Arts Festival in Starkville where Betty was doing a land office business in birdhouses made from gourds. Hold on; suppress that yawn; these aren’t just any ordinary gourd birdhouses.
There are bright red roosters with real feathers and funny women with glasses and shawls — the Rust sisters, so named because the Brillo pads used to make their hair rusts. The birdhouses are so nicely realized, you might not want to hang them from a limb.
Success often comes from seizing an opportunity without fully understanding where it will take you. This opportunity arrived in the form of a vine growing at the edge of Roger’s workshop.
“You’re not chopping that down,” Betty told her husband. “I want to see what’s going to happen.”
What happened was 23 gourds, which Betty stacked up by her mailbox for about six months. Then, as she says, “I got to playing with them.”
She painted flowers on the first gourds, took them to a resale shop in Eupora and “sold $150 worth before I got out of there.”
March last year, she introduced the Rust sisters, all with double names (“because we’re in the South,” Betty says) — names like Eliza Jane, Wilma Lee, Connie Mae. She sells them at craft fairs and through resale shops.
But the Kroger job was wearing her down; she had been with the company 26 years. Anyone who has gone into the Kroger in Starkville can attest to the size of the store. “I was walking eight miles a day,” Betty said.
And then she got word from on High. Sort of. In November her preacher at Calvary Baptist Church in West Point preached three sermons in a row about not wasting one’s God-given talents.
“I think he was looking for people to teach Sunday school,” Betty said.
“It gave me a great big nudge,” she said. “I told my Mama he was talking to me.”
Betty checked with her employer to see if she could afford to retire and was pleasantly surprised. Since then she’s steadily been making birdhouses.
“It’s so much fun. I have to sell them to get them out of the house.”
After our interview, I asked if I could see her studio. Before walking in Betty Sparrow had one more thing to say: “People who are creative ain’t got time to be neat,” she said.
Birney Imes is the publisher of The Dispatch. Email him at [email protected].
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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