A year to the day after John Coatland "Joch" Webb and Mary Alice Williams were married they had their first child.  Named Wylie David Webb, he was called "Dee" for as long as anyone could remember.  Joch had a brother named David Dee Webb and it is surely from him that Wylie was named.  The Wylie name itself is not common to the family, at least not before he was given it.  He was born in Itawamba County, but Dee grew up in the Auburn community in Lee County, Mississippi, just over a set of hills to the east of the growing town of Tupelo.

As a young man, Dee was quite tall, as the photo with his siblings and parents made about 1905 indicates.  He was well over six feet tall (some say he was 6'7" while some say it was closer to 6'5").  He grew up on a farm, just outside a small city, and he was surely helping his father almost constantly, growing corn and cotton and keeping the animals.  Though he was the oldest child, he was by no means the only one.  He had two younger brothers and three younger sisters.  He probably knew both his paternal grandparents since his grandmother died when he was 12 and his grandfather when he was 20.  His maternal grandparents probably died before he was born.

He grew up during the Reconstruction in Mississippi, and he was 13 years old when the century turned.  About that time he must have been greatly intrigued by the explosion of the USS Maine and the ensuing war between the U.S. and Spain.  Two years later the president was assasinated and Teddy Roosevelt took the office.  The U.S. was often sending troops into South and Central America, and by 1912, when Dee was 25, Woodrow Wilson was elected President.  All this would have surely been etched into the mind of a young man growing up at the time.

In July of 1913, as cars were being introduced in the still mostly rural Lee County, one of his aunts became the first automobile fatality in the state of Mississippi.  Later that year, on October 26, Dee married, against his family's wishes, to the 18 year old fiery and independant Miss. Delia Belle Parham.  She was the daughter of Andrew "Andy" P. Parham and Francis "Frankie" Cooper.  She had been born on March 5, 1895 in Prentiss County, Mississippi, probably near Marietta.  Her family moved to around the Auburn Community sometime before 1909.  Dee and Delia might have gone to school together.  The story goes, as Delia use to tell it, that she had been fond of a Williams boy who was a first cousin of Dee, but she met Dee and took a liking to him instead.  Now her dad, Andy, didn't want her to marry anyone at that time, though she was already 18.  But he didn't have anything against Dee.  When that Williams cousin found out that Dee and Delia were going to get married, he went to Andy, hoping to win favor by telling on them.  When he told Andy, he replied, "well ain't you a fine talker.  But it's too bad he's a damn sight better than you are!"  Dee did go to Andy and tell him that they were getting married and though Andy didn't like it, he agreed to it.  Dee and Delia had been heading to the parson's house to get married when they met the preacher in the road in his buggy.  They pulled off on the side in a dry mud-hole and were married then and there!  Delia used to tell the story of her wedding in a mud-hole, and laughing, she'd add to that, "and I've been living in one ever since!"

North Mississippi may have been relatively quiet while the newlyweds began to settle down, but in Europe, on June 28, 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assasinated.  Austria invaded Serbia and World War I had begun.  Dee and Delia's first child arrived later that year.  On November 16, 1914, named most likely for their wartime president, Wilson Witt Webb was born (as Wilson was not a Webb or Parham name), better known later as "Jack."   They were probably living either in the Auburn Community.  When the war broke out, all men of fighting age were required to submit their names and personal information to the Draft Board.  Dee and his brothers were all found in these files.  But for some reason, when the draft did occur, Dee did not go.  He either was not chosen or had a medical condition that kept him out (like one of his brothers).  But before the war had broken out, Delia was pregnant with their second child.  Arthur Buster Webb was born on October 24, 1916 in a little wooden house on the side of Highway 78 in Skyline.  Skyline was a small community on the highway that led east out of Tupelo to Fulton.  The house still stands today, but just barely.  A few weeks after he was born, Wilson won his second term in office in one of the closest presidential elections in U.S. history.  The U.S. declared war on April 6, 1917.  It is not known how the family felt about the war, but many Americans were opposed to it.  Dee's grandmother, who had already passed away, was of entirely German descent, but it may not have mattered.  In December of 1918, the war was over.

On January 12 of 1919, Wylie Joe Webb was born.  The family was still living in Lee County and Dee, though he still farmed occassionally throughout his life, was pursueing other opportunities.  Besides farming, Dee contracted to do highway construction jobs in the years when work was done by mules and scrapers.  He did this work with his father in law, Andy Parham.  They had subcontracted and hauled concrete to the old 78 highway from Tupelo to Fulton and they regularly used convicts from the local jails to do much of the work on the roads since it was a public expense ultimately.

He must have been doing well though, since by around 1919, he and Delia had made enough money to open their own general store.  But in 1924, when Delia was about seven months pregnant with Elmer and Velmer, the store burned down.  Their son, Elmer Dee Webb, described the store and the terrible accident which befell the young family.
 

"Dee also owned a general merchandise store in the Gilvo community.  It sat right across the old Highway 78 from the Gilvo Cemetery, where a white wooden house sits today (in between old Hwy 78 and old, old 78).  It had a very large stock of goods and served as a gas station also.  One night in late 1924, the hogs got out and the men got on their horses to go find them and bring them back.  A neighbor's teenage son wanted to go with them, but they said he would slow them down and they refused to let him go.  While they were gone, he set fire to the store and it burned to the ground.  Wylie had been in the process of moving his gas pumps 10 feet further away from the store when the fire broke out and his insurance wouldn't cover him till he did it.  It was in the space of this lapse that the fire caught.  He lost everything."

The country was changing too.  A new president, Harding, had been elected in 1920 and the country was having economic recessions every few years.  Coolidge became president on Harding's death in 1923 about the same time motion pictures were being given their first showings across the country.  Once Dee and Delia moved out from Gilvo, Dee managed a dairy in what is today known as Tupelo, but then was the town of Harrisburng.  This must have been about 1925.  The dairy was owned then by the future congressman John Rankin.  It was located on the western side of town and the family lived on the premises.  It was in this environment that Delia, on February 13, 1925, gave birth to twins.  Velma Delia and Elmer Dee Webb were the last children of Dee and Delia.  The family must have been pretty well off at this point from descriptions of their life through their children.

It was at this point that Dee owned and operated a woodyard in Tupelo at Willis Heights.  He regularly hauled wood from there down to the Tombigbee river on the new highway he had helped construct.  At first this took place with mule-drawn carts, then he had a fleet of Model-T trucks (seven according to Elmer Webb).  But he traded them in for a "Runnels" truck - a big one that could carry more than they could all together.

When the stock markets crashed in February 1928, Dee was still at the dairy.  Things became progressively worse and the dairy couldn't find people to pay for the milk they were producing.  At first they started lowering prices.  Then they were forced to give the milk away, since it would spoil if they let it sit.  In those days there was no pasteurization like we have today.  Finally, they decided to start selling off the cows.  But there were no buyers.  I have been told that Dee delivered milk to the more needy families for free and then he gave away many of the cows to families who were especially hard hit, since they would have just starved anyway if they had to keep all of them, given the inability to purchase feed.  Elmer and Velmer started school at Rankin in about 1931.  It was hard times, but the family did make it through the Depression, though they lost grandpa Joch in 1933.

After they gave up on the dairy, Dee and his oldest son Jack, by now about 15 years old, went to work for L.P. (Leroy Pleasant) McCarty and Sons.  They were delivering groceries in trucks all around Tupelo and Lee County, and even over into Alabama sometimes.  The family moved back out past Skyline to the Gilvo community, and the children were going to school at Mooreville.  Velma remembers being in the 2nd grade there.

But they didn't stay there long.  They moved back to Tupelo a year or two later and Elmer and Velmer returned to school in Tupelo.

Though Dee must have been a very good businessman, bad luck followed him around.  Up in the "Tater Hills," he owned some land (about 80 acres) southeast of Tupelo where Tombigbee State Park is today, but he had to sell it when the family was low on money during the depths of the Depression.  A prominent Tupelo businessman bought it up for a low price and shortly after that the federal government purchased it to place a Civilian Conservation Corps camp (part of FDR's New Deal) on the site.  Some family members felt that there was knowledge that the government was planning on buying it, and that's why the man made a good deal on it when he sold it back to the government at a higher price than he gave Dee for it.  Some of the land that was Dee's today is where the headquarters and recreation area of the park, as well as some of the lake, is now located.

There was also the time when he made a deal with a man who owned a good deal of land in the Twenty Mile Bottom, in Itawamba County.  Dee agreed to clear a large tract of land in the bottom of the trees on it, if he could plant the fields and take all the profit from them for three years.  The man agreed and Dee hired a lot of workers to cut the trees, remove stumps, and till the land until it was in good enough condition to plant.  The first year, a flood wiped away the crops and he didn't make a cent.  The same thing happened the next year, and the year after that.  For three years it flooded and Dee didn't make anything back on his investment.

In about 1935, Delia had saved up money from her work as a saleswoman and the family bought a house on Lumpkin Drive in Tupelo.  But the old owner went back on his offer and they had to leave there for a house on Francis Circle (near the Tupelo Public Golf Course) on the west side of town.  When the famous tornado hit Tupelo on a Sunday night in 1936 (April 5) at about 8:55 pm, the house they were in was not harmed.  They said it shook the house and even may have lifted it up a little off the foundations, but no significant harm was done.  But their old house at Willis Heights was completely levelled.  The school that Elmer and Velmer went to was wiped away.  It was in that tornado that Delia's mother, Francis Cooper Parham, was violently killed.  Other members of Delia's family also died, including her sister Ruby's husband and two children.  Dee told that he attended 17 funerals in one day.  The tornado itself is currently labeled as the 4th most deadly tornado ever in the United States.  It killed 216 people in Lee County and injured 700 more.  It has been labeled an F5, the most deadly and dangerous of all tornadoes. For more information on the tornado, see below.

Delia was in a bad condition after her mother's death.  By the fall of that year, the family had packed up and moved to Arkansas in hopes of finding better crops to tend for others.  Massive numbers of Southerners moved during the Depression, trying to find better places to be hired on at or just to get through the year.  Elmer and Velmer were enrolled in school there, but the family occassionaly went back home to visit relatives.  In early 1938, Dee and Delia went back to a funeral of a relative.  They relied heavily upon the trains for transportation, but since one ran from St. Louis down to Memphis, and then down to Tupelo, they could quickly ride back.  However, for this particular trip, they didn't have quite enough money for Dee, Delia, and the two youngest children to all go.  Velmer and elmer were almost 13 years old by then, but Delia told the ticket agent that they were 11 and almost 12.  This allowed them to both ride at the price it would cost a 13 year old to go.  So they boarded the train and when the conducter came around and saw that they were twins, he asked them how old they were.  Delia quickly replied that they were 11 and almost 12.  But Dee, whom the children said could never tell a lie, said, "no they aren't Delia.  They are 12 and almost 13!"  She told him to hush up and that he didn't know what he was talking about.  With a wink, the conductor said that the mother would probably know better and punching their tickets, went on by.

Times were not much better in Arkansas though.  Every one of Dee and Delia's children had to quit school before they finished, so that they could help the family farm.  There's a great deal of pride in something like that, and if it doesn't make those today all the more greatful that they have the opportunities they do, then something's wrong with them.

While they were gone, in 1940, Mary Alice Williams died back in Mississippi.  They lived for a while there in Arkansas.  In 1943, Andy Parham passed away in the Mississippi Delta.  And just three years later, in Etowah, Arkansas, Dee died.  He was brought back to Tupelo and buried at Priceville Cemetery.  Delia moved back to Tupelo not long after that.  She lived in what is today Elmer's house in the Tater Hills while he worked in St. Louis.  She lived for nearly 20 more years after that.  Hopefully, I will one day have a page devoted to the rest of her life, since there is so much to say about her!  But for now, this is all on Dee and his family.

Tupelo Daily Journal
March 26, 1965; page 5

W.D. Webb Funeral Set For Wednesday
    Funeral services for W.D. Webb, 59, who died Sunday morning at his home in Etoway, Ark., will be held Wednesday at 2:30 p.m. at the East Tupelo Baptist Church, wit the Rev. Ike Berryhill officiating.
    Burial will be in the Priceville Cemetery with Pegues in charge.
    Mr. Webb's body was brought to the home of his son, Jack Webb, in the Feemster Lake community.  Services were postponed from Tuesday to Wednesday afternoon so that relatives living some distance from Tupelo could attend.

Rites for Mrs. W.D. Webb
    Will Be Held In East Heights Church

    Mrs. W.D. Webb, resident of the New Hope Community near Tupelo for 36 years, died at 1:40 p.m. Tuesday in Community Hospital after an illness of four months.  She was 71.
    Services will be held at 11 a.m. Thursday in East Heights Baptist Church with the Revs. S.S. Kelly, Walter Duncan and Harold Wilder officiating.  Burial will be in Priceville Cemetery with W.E. Pegues Funeral Directors in charge.
    Mrs. Webb was born in Prentiss County and was a sales woman for Tillie Murphy dresses.  She was a member of West Ridge Baptist Church in Lepanto, Ark.  She moved to Lee County when she was a child, and was the former Miss. Delia Parham.
    She was married in 1913 in Lee County to Mr. Webb, who died on March 23, 1946.
    Mrs. Webb leaves a daughter, Mrs. Velma Lum of Morton; four sons, Jack and Arthur Webb of Tupelo, Wiley Joe Webb of Blythesville, Ark., and Elmer Webb of St. Louis; four sisters, Mrs. Gertrude Holt of Vonna, Texas, Mrs. Ruby Looney and Mrs. Letha Cole of Tupelo and Mrs. Ben Austin of Mooreville; two brothers, Joe and Bill Parham of Tupelo; 23 grandchildren and 10 great grandchildren.

Wilson Witt "Jack" Webb (md. Emma Jewel Smith)

Arthur Buster Webb (md. Tommie Edith Kelly)

Wylie Joe Webb (md. Beatrice Brothers)

Elmer Dee Webb (md. Betty)

Velmer Delia Webb (md. Marshall Taylor Lumm, Sr.)