A TRIBUTE TO MRS. MYRA HAYS GALE By Carrie Greenwood My first recollection of Myra was in her home September 8, 1862, seventy-one years ago next week. On that day my brother Gordon was born and her mother “cousin” Maria as we always called her, being our nearest one I might say our only neighbor, I was taken to her home to spend the say with her little daughter Myra. My home was on what is not the Burkhart farm and the hays farm joined it on the east. It seems a long time ago but if I were an artist I think I could paint a picture of the old home as it stood. Then a weather boarded log house with low ceilings and windows with small panes. A large living room with a huge log fireplace and high mantel. The ceiling and sides were papered with a block pattern of green shades of brown. Cousin Maria loved flowers, as did her two daughters. You entered a lawn in front of the house filled with a greater variety of flowers than we had in our own home, The polly anthiemns and sweet scented shrubs always stand our in my memory as belonging to that garden and sixty years later Myra gave me a root that came from it. To this day I always associate that flower where ever I see it with Myra and her mother. The beautiful white hydrangea that are in bloom all over Newport now was first grown by Mrs. Hays.   The large one owned by J. E. W. Greene’s Store was a slip given by Mrs. Ella McRae. After my first meeting Myra, I cannot recall any thing definite until she was five and I was four. We went to call on our first Sunday School teacher. Mrs. Downer who lived where Mr. Cy Bayless home is. We often laughed about it, how proud I was of a new red cape I wore and how I would not let her knock when we reached her home.   We did not attend the same primary school as our family moved from the farm in Newport before we were old enough to attend. Later we attended the old high school in the old M. E. Church that stood where the abandoned brick now stands. She coming from the Woodside School not occupied by Wilbur Davis as a residence and I from the village school opposite Bill Bosworth’s home. One of her accomplishments I always admired and that she retained all her life was her penmanship. She always was a good reader.   She became interested in the church work in her early teens and was one of the members of the Missionary Society that was organized on June 5, 1887, her interest in the work and success of the society never waned even when her health would not permit her to attend the regular meetings. She not only read her own Woman’s Friend by subscribed for others numbers of members who did not have it, faithfully mastering the Mystery Questions, regular in paying her dues. Contributing to all special calls and needs. Often early become interested in the work and no doubt Mrs. Gale inherited the same interested fro after her mother was gone she continued to pay her dues for years, finally transferred them to her niece and thus added a new member who is following in the footsteps of her grandmother and aunt in the good work.   We will miss her in many ways in the New Year. We are about to enter, but we will cherish the memory of what she had been to the church and Missionary Society and grant that we are left be also faithful.