There are love stories.
And then there is this love story.
“Jimmie had a good day,” Bill Barefoot, who is 76, recently wrote to a church friend. “Getting very good care at St. Joseph of the Pines during the day. SJP will be sending someone to help get Jimmie ready each morning Monday through Friday. We have to hand-feed Jimmie, but she eats three meals a day, plus snacks. Her weight is down to 82 pounds. We are 10-plus years down the road with Alzheimer’s. She’s still my Jimmie, and what memories we have.”
He had been working at the old Black & Decker power tool manufacturing plant along U.S. Business 301 for about two years in 1969, and Jimmie Ann McFayden was the new girl with the long, dark hair down to her waist and the pretty smile.
“There was a boy from Hope Mills working there, and he knew everybody in Hope Mills,” Barefoot says about the girl with the striking good looks who was a 1966 graduate of Hope Mills High School. “He said he knew her and her sister.”
Barefoot mustered up the courage to ask her on a dinner date not long after, when he was a roving operations inspector for the plant and Jimmie Ann McFayden was working on the hedge-trimmer assembly line.
“She said, ‘I’m not interested right now,’” he says.
His mind wanders back to those days more than 50 years ago.
“I knew from Day 1,” Bill Barefoot says.
He was smitten.
“I wasn’t going to give up,” Barefoot says. “I found out she liked bowling, and I invited her one Saturday night to Lafayette Lanes. She played hard-to-get for a long time. Then I took her to the Embers Club for our first dance in Raleigh. I learned her values and about how she was raised. I knew she was my kind of girl. We dated for a year and married on March 6, 1970, at my parents’ house in Bordeaux behind the hospital. We decided we wanted a simple wedding. Before we got married, we talked about kids.”
Life would take them far and wide for his executive leadership jobs to include Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, Costa Rica and Hougie, China, not far from Hong Kong, and back to Hope Mills when he retired in 2005.
And three daughters would bless the marriage — Leigh Ann Longfellow, now 53, who is married and lives in New Jersey; Billie Renae Ramthun, 50, married and living in Peach Tree City, Georgia; and Jennifer Alyce Hannum, 48, who is married and residing in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
No matter where the family lived, Jimmie Ann Barefoot was involved in her daughters’ lives, their schools and the church.
“Where Bill is and my girls,” Jimmie Ann Barefoot once would say, “that’s home.”
Faith in the Lord was at the core of Bill and Jimmie Ann Barefoot’s lives, while they were involved in churches in every state and China along the way before Snyder Memorial Baptist Church in Fayetteville. And Jimmie Ann would become a member of the choir.
“After coming back, we visited several churches,” he says, “and Jimmie Ann felt Snyder best fitted us.”
And they liked being a part of the Sunday school class led by Bob Ervin, with friends who included Bill and Billie Jackson, Danny and Faye Highsmith, Wayne and Jean Ham, Roy Weaver, Dr. Al Hartness, Joanne Copeland and Judy Dawkins.
Life was good, and Bill Barefoot would build the couple a two-story home on Hall Street, overlooking the home of Alyce Hall, the grandmother Jimmie Ann Barefoot loved with all her heart.
The couple enjoyed when their daughters would come home for visits, and the grandchildren loved all the games in the recreation room outside the house that would keep them entertained into the wee hours of any morning. And where Jimmie Ann Barefoot was known for her pasta with ground beef, her fried pork chops just for Bill and, he says, “She could make a mean banana pudding.”
‘They kept telling me’
When the daughters weren’t visiting, they were constantly calling.
“They kept telling me I needed to have her checked because she kept repeating herself,” Bill Barefoot says about what was diagnosed in 2011 as Alzheimer’s, when Jimmie Ann Barefoot just was 63 years old.
It was suggested by neurologists, Bill Barefoot says, that his wife give up cooking and driving an automobile.
“She said, ‘I’m not giving up my driving,’” he says. “But then one night she came home from choir practice and threw her keys on the counter and said, ‘I’m not driving anymore,’ after she saw a sign that said Elizabethtown. Still, she managed to get back home.”
The disease was progressing.
“It’s been about three years,” he says, “when she lost her ability to talk, and she’s losing mobility now.”
You look around the home on Hall Street and you see all the trappings of Jimmie Ann Barefoot’s touch, from the china cabinet with the dishes and cups placed just right to the grandfather clock to the many photographs of Bill and Jimmy Ann Barefoot’s lives together, and the daughters they love.
“I have to hand-feed her,” Bill Barefoot says. “I get her up for breakfast at 8 a.m. When I get her up in the mornings, she smiles at me. That just means everything to me.”
Then they take the drive to St. Joseph in the Pines off Raeford Road for clinical and rehabilitation and holistic care. Bill Barefoot brings her back home in the afternoon throughout the week.
“St. Joseph in the Pines,” he says, “is just wonderful.”
They no longer attend church services at Snyder Memorial Baptist Church or attend Bob Ervin’s Sunday school class. They watch a livestream of the service.
“She sings along with the choir,” he says. “She remembers the words to the songs.”
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Memories of happy times
Alzheimer’s disease has robbed Jimmie Ann Barefoot of so much of the life she once knew. And a loving husband’s life, too.
“It is tough. But when I really get down, I start thinking of memories with her, when she was raising the girls and the places we went and how excited she got,” he says. “Just the little things.”
Memories of a wife who wanted and earned a college degree at age 40. Of holding one another on the dance floor. Of a wife’s golf swing so accurate and pure. Of watching her joy in seeing new places. Of a Christmas morning by the tree. Of her effervescent personality. Of a woman with uncompromising faith in her Lord and savior.
And surely of that day at the old Black & Decker plant, when Jimmie Ann McFayden was the new girl with the long, dark hair down to her waist and the pretty smile on the hedge-trimmer assembly line.
“She is my life partner,” he says, “and everything to me.”
Epilogue
Bill Barefoot leans back in his living room recliner.
He relives that day on the assembly line at the power tool plant.
“I loved her from the first time I laid eyes on her,” Bill Barefoot says, and he recalls the email he recently wrote to his church friend Judy Dawkins. “We are 10-plus years down the road with Alzheimer’s. She’s still my Jimmie, and what memories we have.”
Bill Kirby Jr. can be reached at billkirby49@gmail.com or 910-624-1961.
