After they had moved North and started their own families, two of Amy Ruth’s daughters, Inez and Esther, would send their children South to spend the summer months with their grandparents in Alabama. They knew that Alabama would be a safer and more enriching place for the kids to spend their idle summertime, less full of opportunities for them to go astray.

During those summer months, all of the kids were assigned chores. The main tasks included mowing the rather large lawn and picking vegetables from the garden. Most of the boys preferred yard work. But one of Inez’s sons, Carl S. Redding, disliked working in the hot sun; he preferred to seek refuge in the house, working by his grandmother’s side as she prepared meals for the family. He would help her by shucking corn, peeling field peas, or rolling out biscuit dough with a broomstick.