Jamie Janet Clubb, who died at age 90 on April 7 in Fort Morgan, believed in the Old Farmer’s Almanac with a nearly militant zeal, refraining from sowing even the seeds she started indoors until securing her copy of the venerable reference.
“If you don’t plant by the sign, things won’t grow,” Clubb told her children, explaining her devotion to astrologically based agronomy.
She made an exception for potatoes, which she planted every year on Good Friday. She planted a lot of them.
Clubb’s garden in Pea Green, a tiny Western Slope farming hamlet between Olathe and Delta, typically included six to 10 rows each of potatoes, tomatoes, strawberries, sweet peas, green beans, collard greens, cabbage, okra, sweet corn, zucchini, yellow squash and other vegetables, including a mystery legume she called a Luella Bean.
“It was kind of like a black-eyed pea, only bigger,” recalled daughter Gwendolyn Clubb Lane. “The lady who gave those seeds to her was named Luella. So mom always called them Luella Beans. They were so good. I’ve never seen another Luella Bean, and I miss them.”
Clubb, born Oct. 26, 1915, was the third of John and Bessie Sapps’ 15 children, four of whom died in infancy. The Sapps were farmers, with a spread near Lawley in northeastern Florida. They raised cattle, pigs and a garden so bountiful that the Sapps rarely bought supplies other than rice and grits.
As an adult, Clubb never raised cattle or pigs, but she kept chickens and rabbits, and showed her son and daughters the butchering skills she learned as a child. The three Clubb children loved their mother’s fried chicken almost as much as they detested preparing the birds that went on the table.
“If I never have to butcher another chicken in all my days, I’ll be a happy person,” Lane said. “I can smell those wet feathers right now. I’m serious. You always had to pull the tail and wing feathers first. Once they got cold, it was a lot harder to pull them. But oh … my mom made the best fried chicken.”
The Clubb children were nearly as fond of their mother’s chicken and dumplings, ethereal little pillows so downy they defied replication. They cared less for okra, the viscous cooked vegetable that often is an acquired taste.
Schooled as a tot to rise before dawn to work in the garden before the temperature soared, Jamie Clubb often watched the sun rise as she pulled weeds and watered her plants from early spring to late autumn. Sometimes she experimented. One year, she tried raising celery, but found it too much work for the meager results. Another year, she raised 100 tomato plants.
When her children were toddlers, she brought them out with her during planting season. From Good Friday to the last hard frost in May, her children helped carefully cover hundreds of seedlings with small clay pots in the evening, and returned in the morning to take them off again.
Like the seedlings, Clubb loved the sun. She wore a broad-brimmed straw hat to protect her fair skin, but luxuriated in sunlight all her life. In the final year of her life, on cold but clear winter days, she often sat before her open front door, soaking in the sun.
During the harvest season, the yield from Clubb’s garden filled her freezer, cupboards and dinner table, along with those of neighbors and friends. She distributed countless loaves of strawberry bread, fortified at Christmas with candied fruit.
Her spaghetti sauce became legendary among members of the Nucla High School wrestling team, coached by her son-in-law. On the night before out-of-town meets, the team met at Clubb’s house for spaghetti dinners. Then they slept in the home’s enormous living room before arising pre-dawn to travel 100 miles or more to their 7 a.m. weigh-ins at other schools.
“You could sleep 20 wrestlers there, and another five or six in the dining room,” Lane said.
In late 2003, Clubb moved to Akron, where she lived near her niece, Janet Starlin. She kept a small garden for a year, but reluctantly gave it up after tripping too often on her snaggle-toed sneakers.
Her home was along the route to two local schools, and the students knew to turn to Clubb for a treat. She was generous with the bite-sized Snickers that she kept to satisfy her sweet tooth, while restricting her girth.
Survivors include son Gene Clubb of Eugene, Ore.; daughters Gwendolyn Lane of Redvale and Allison Milroy of Greeley; eight grandchildren; and one great-grandson. Her husband, Walter Clubb, and one grandson preceded her in death.
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-820-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
