When Bobbie Butler smiled, the whole world smiled back. From the time she was a young girl until late in life, Bobbie never lost her ability to light up a room with her smile.
Ask anyone what he or she remembers about Bobbie and the first thing that person is likely to say is, “her smile.”
Born in Greenwood, Miss., on May 11, 1927, to Hugh Davis and Louise [Holland] Moore. Bobbie was the fourth child of Hugh and Louise, following big brothers James and Doug and sister, Madie. Later she would be joined by a little sister, Dorothy. Hugh and Louise also had a sixth child, a daughter who was stillborn.
Growing up in Mississippi
Bobbie with her parents
The first house the Moore family lived in had an outhouse and an outside water pump. Later they moved into town and had indoor plumbing – an unheard of luxury in the rural areas of Mississippi during that time.
The family had a wagon and two mules named Shorty and Bill. Bill was a very, very large mule, but very friendly and playful. Shorty was neither.
“Shorty was frisky and kicked the plow so hard that once he cut up Daddy, so they had to get rid of him,” Bobbie liked to tell her grandchildren. “You just couldn’t ‘play’ with Shorty like you could with Bill.”
The family always had two or three cows and struggled to make ends meet. Some of their share crop cotton was sold to buy the clothes for the winter months. During the Depression Bobbie and her siblings would cut out cardboard and put it inside their shoes to cover the holes.
Bobbie spent many months picking cotton in her father’s cotton fields. She had a special relationship with her Daddy and followed him everywhere, even if it meant working in the fields or milking cows, which she did daily.
In 1937, Bobbie was 10 years old. Every day she got up at 5 a.m. and pumped water into buckets and carried them inside the house. She was in charge of milking the cows and that was next on her list. Then it was time to go to the fields and pick cotton.
Bobbie’s mother would fix a large lunch and after eating lunch, everyone would take an afternoon nap on the front porch. Upon awakening, everyone would return to the fields and pick cotton until sundown. But, before she could relax and eat a large supper and go to bed, Bobbie had to once again milk the cows.
But, what Bobbie remembered the most was that every night after supper she got to sit on Daddy’s lap and the family would talk about their day. Sometimes – for a bedtime snack – they would pop popcorn or roast sweet potatoes in the glowing embers of the fireplace.
Bobbie would continue this work ethic throughout her lifetime and go on to instill the same work ethic in her daughters. She never sat still and was always doing something. She was unstoppable and had tireless energy, right up until the insidious Parkinson’s disease entered and ravaged her body and slowed her down for the first time in her life.
Bob and Bobbie
When she was 15, she began working at Hamburger Café as a waitress. She received 75 cents an hour, which was a pretty good wage for the time. There was an Army base in Biloxi, not far from Greenwood, and many of the soldiers frequented the café. And, many of them came in just to admire the pretty waitress with the friendly smile named Bobbie.
“There were dozens of small country stores that lined the streets for miles,” Bobbie would tell her children and grandchildren years later when talking of Greenwood.
Segregation was a given. Greenwood was a typical Southern town of 18,000, and black citizens had separate restroom facilities and drinking fountains from the white population.
The main industry was the town’s cotton gin, and Piggly Wiggly was the place to go for groceries.
One day a soldier named Robert “Bob” Butler came into the café. They exchanged friendly banter and there was an instant attraction between the two. They exchanged friendly banter. As Bob prepared to leave and go back to the Army base, he left a penny tip, and then waited by the door to see Bobbie’s reaction. She picked up the penny and threw it at him.
Within months, they married. Bobbie was not quite 17 years old.
Mr. and Mrs. Bob and Bobbie Butler – how perfect was that? The couple would enjoy a long and happy marriage until Bob’s death 25 years later on June 14, 1968.
Moving North
Bob was from a strange place in Indiana called Churubusco. A year after they married, in 1946, Bob was discharged from the Army, and he and Bobbie moved north.
They rented a house in Arcola was three bedrooms, one of which had dirt floors, but soon moved to a house on U.S. 33 – called Goshen Road at that time – several miles south of Churubusco near Bob’s brother’s farm.
Peggy Tomlinson, Donna Gilbert, Jean McGuire, Bobbie Butler
Bob and Bobbie had three daughters, Jean, Peggy and Donna. Bobbie often said she was very joyful of being blessed with “those three beautiful ladies.” But, she said, it was especially hard after her husband died unexpectedly and at a young age in 1968, leaving Bobbie to raise the girls on her own.
Although she was a traditional mother in every sense of the word, and her family and daughters were top priority, Bobbie had never known life without hard work, so she went to work immediately after moving to Indiana.
Her first job in Churubusco was working for the local weekly newspaper, the Tri-County Truth, where she hand-folded papers for delivery.
Next, she landed a job at Harold McCoy’s egg hatchery on Line Street in Churubusco. Her job was to place the eggs under a light and “read” them. She also later got the gruesome job of de-beaking the chickens so they did not peck at each other.
That Gorgeous Lady
Bobbie began working at the Churubusco Dana/Victor Gasket factory in 1951, where she worked on the line as a packager. She worked there 26 years before retiring. Co-workers remember her as “That classy, drop-dead gorgeous lady with the beautiful smile.”
Co-worker Irieta Coleman of Fort Wayne remembers working with Bobbie. “Her girls meant the world to her. They were ‘her life’,” Irieta said. “She was never boisterous; she was quiet, but she also loved to joke and kid around.”
“She was always particular about her appearance and always was perfectly coifed and dressed,” Coleman went on to say. “The rest of us could never figure out why we would have glue all over us after a day of packaging, but Bobbie did not. She still looked perfect.”
“She was a very nice lady.”
Another co-worker, Arlene Halsey, said she worked with Bobbie for many years. “I truly admired her,” Halsey said. “She was a lady with a lot of dignity and class.”
When Bobbie was not working, she liked to garden, listen to music, dance, tend to her flowers or sew and cook.
“She loved to sew,” remembers her daughter Peggy. “She taught me to sew and she sewed all of our clothes.”
Bobbie also loved to cook, and her specialty was southern style dishes. “We grew up on black-eyed peas, cornbread, sweet potatoes and okra,” Peggy said. “Our friends thought these were strange foods, but we loved them.”
The Butler family eventually moved to a home on Railroad Street in Churubusco, then to a home not far away on Mill Street, where they stayed only a short time before finding their permanent home on Orchard Lane, on the south edge of Churubusco.
Even when working fulltime, taking care of her family, gardening, and all of the domestic chores that went along with running a household, Bobbie always found time for her family and friends, particularly those in need.
In the early 1970’s, when her close friend was dying of cancer, Bobbie spent many, many hours at her bedside, caring for and spending time with her.
Bobbie was very particular about her appearance, her home and even the way the girls hung wet clothes on the clothesline. “She insisted that all like garments be hung neatly together,” Peggy remembers. “It seemed ridiculous to me, but I knew I would be doing it over if I didn’t abide by her wishes.”
“I wasn’t afraid of mom, but I was always aware of that switch she kept on top of the refrigerator!” Peggy added.
When her girls were young, they watched a lot of westerns with their mother. As the people on TV sat around their campfires eating with their tin pans in hand, Bobbie would hand her daughters a hamburger and beans concoction in tin pans, so they could pretend they were doing the same.
Family Is Everything
Dozens of family members would crowd into the small Orchard Lane home to spend Christmas together
Bobbie loved spending the holidays with her family. Every Christmas Eve, Bobbie’s daughters and all of her grandchildren would crowd into Bobbie’s tiny, two-bedroom house on Orchard Lane.
Bobbie and her daughters would always light the luminas – bags with sand and candles inside – and line the driveway. Bobbie always managed to spend hours conjuring up a unique way each year to stuff a small amount of money into some sort of ornament on the tree for each grandchild.
It’s one of her grandson, Chris Tomlinson’s favorite memories. “The kids would sit staring in awe at the tree, trying to guess which group of ornaments held our tiny little fortune for that night,” he remembers.
Bobbie never lost the child inside. She loved to have fun. Her daughter, Donna, said it was nothing for her mother to suddenly laugh and turn cartwheels on the beach.
“The joy of feeding geese bread from your hands at the lake, spending a day shopping and having pie and coffee at Richard’s restaurant afterward – Mom never lost her childlike enthusiasm for those kinds of things,” Donna said. “She never asked for much. She always appreciated the simple things in life.”
Her favorite thing to do with her husband was to sit on the porch and talk. With her children and grandchildren it was much the same. Whenever she could spend time with them and laugh and enjoy small moments, she was at her happiest.
Enjoying Every Minute
A Christmas Eve tradition that carried on for many years involved skits the grandkids would put on to entertain the adults. But, many times Bobbie couldn’t resist and she too, would join in on the comedy, dressing up in hilarious outfits and singing and dancing and acting silly right alongside her grandchildren.
She retired from Dana when she was 62. Never one to sit idly at home, she immersed herself in her home and family, especially her grandchildren. The grandkids could usually find Grandma Bobbie riding her lawn tractor, weeding her garden, picking fresh flowers or baking in the kitchen.
As a retirement gift Bobbie’s daughters took their mother to Nashville, Tennessee, to see the Grand Old Opry – a lifelong dream of Bobbie’s – where they watched a fantastic show, had dinner in a local restaurant and enjoyed the companionship of a “girls’ weekend out.”
Without a doubt there was always a little bit of mischief in Bobbie’s life. From acting like a ham for the camera to flirting with the gentlemen folk, she truly was a child at heart who had a real zest for life.
Peggy remembers taking her mother to see a waterfall in a picnic area near the Huntington Reservoir. “We had to walk through woods, climb down a hill and over some rocky terrain to see the water spilling over the cliff’s edge to the creek below. 
Experiencing the beauty of nature with her will be a memory I’ll never forget,” Peggy said.
Peggy, who inherited her mother’s green thumb, spent many hours with her mom, planting flowers and gardening. “We always checked with one another in the spring to see who had the first flower coming up. I think she always won,” Peggy remembers with a laugh.
Dancing in Heaven
After her retirement, in the late 1990’s, Bobbie was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Her family took care of her as long as they could. Six years before her death, her daughters made the painful decision to move her to the Oaks in Columbia City where she could get round the clock nursing care. Soon after that devastating news came an added diagnosis of dementia.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Peggy said. “But we could no longer lift her and she could not walk. I cried and cried, and when I told mom we were going to move her to the Oaks, she hugged me and told me it would be okay.”
At the nursing home her family would visit and push Bobbie in a wheelchair around the buildings and talk about flowers and gardening.
Shining through the dementia, Bobbie always seemed to recognize her family.
“I will always treasure the huge smile she would give me when I would go see her at the Oaks,” Peggy said. “When the physical smile went away, I could still see a little twinkle in her eyes.”
Bobbie lived at The Oaks for six years, up until her death at 8:45 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 10, 2009.
Bobbie’s days of turning cartwheels on the beach and doing funny skits with her grandchildren and dancing with her loving husband were over.
But she continues to dance in the minds and memories of her three children and 18 grandchildren, who were greatly influenced by the funny, beautiful lady who loved them and showed them how to appreciate and enjoy every single moment of life – no matter how fleeting that moment may be.
