Indomitable and Ageless: Grannie Joyce refuses to let time slow her down

Traveling south of Naylor to the end of Highway W, the first thing one sees as the roadway veers right and continues along the Missouri-Arkansas border, is a well-manicured landmark known to locals as Robison Park.

A closer inspection of the grounds is likely to reveal the park’s caretaker moving about doing her chores, 91-year-old Velma Joyce Robison.

A petite figure wearing a straw hat, Mrs. Robison works almost tirelessly in her efforts to maintain the park, carrying out the mission she shared with her late husband, Gerald, to transform an unsightly five-acre pigpen into something beautiful.

She’s accomplished just that, and so much more during her lifetime, most of which has been spent in the Naylor Community.

“Gerald and I moved here 73 years ago, and I’ve lived here every day since,” she says, explaining the idea of a park came to them about 30 years ago, at an age when most people would be planning their retirement.

“Gerald’s dad, [the late Charlie Robison] had died and his mother, Mae, was still living. He wanted to build the park for his mother, and as a memorial to his dad,” explains Mrs. Robison, whom locals respectfully and affectionately refer to as “Grannie Joyce.”

She recalls, “We started the park in 1990. There was a big pond out there, and he filled that in.”

The couple continued to work together on the property that first summer and the next, leveling out the grounds, but Gerald Robison died suddenly and unexpectedly from a heart attack in 1992.

“So, I just kept working at it, every summer, and finished it,” she says.

Her use of the term, “finished” means that the spirited senior has developed the property to the point where she can more easily mow it; however, one gets the impression it’s far from finished.

A multi-talented artist who paints, quilts and does woodworking, Mrs. Robison continues to design, sculpt and landscape the grounds to her liking, adding planters and trees, shrubs, flowers, grasses and structures to make the park more interesting.

Among the first of her projects, Mrs. Robison designed and commissioned a metalworks artist to build a garden arch feature which sits prominently in the center of the park. The structure is accented by flowers, shrubs and a family of deer. It bears the name, Robison and the initials of each generation of Robisons who have inhabited the property.

Artfully placed on the grounds are other planters, mostly vignettes, each having a central piece or object which inspired it: a windmill, a dinner bell, or something whimsical such as an old leaky gas tank, turned on its side and flanked with wagon wheels.

“With the wheels leaning against it, I thought it looked like the engine of a train. So I painted a face on it, to give it personality,” she explains.

Most of the planters Mrs. Robison constructed from rocks and mortar, rather than timber, because she says, “wood eventually rots, but the ones built with rocks will be there forever.”

A church bell is attractively featured in one of the planters, a gift from the Baptist church she attended for many years, before the congregation disbursed and services were no longer held there. The church bell tower had tumbled to the ground, and was about halfway buried when Mrs. Robison offered to buy it.

Photo provided

“It had been donated to the church and they didn’t feel it was right for them to sell it to me, so they had me sign a statement that I would keep it, or at least not sell it,” she says.

She built a base for the bell out of rock and some of the original siding of the tower.

Also located on a part of the park is an old, weathered corn crib that her son Dennis restored and turned into a storage shed, another memorial to the farm’s history.

“I wanted it to look like an old log cabin,” says Mrs. Robison, who painted a faux window on the outside in a quilt block pattern and added a folksy welcoming sign at the door.

As unlikely as it sounds, Mrs. Robison solely maintains the park’s five acres, as well as her own half-acre lawn and two acres of yard next to the park owned by her son, Dennis and his wife, Jackie.

“I spend one day picking up fallen branches and sticks, and then it takes me about 10 or 11 hours over two days to mow. Sometimes my son, Dwayne, helps me pick up sticks,” she says.

Dwayne, a retired truck driver with a military background in aviation mechanics, builds Ultralight planes and has a hangar on the back side of the park. He and his wife, Norene, reside in Poplar Bluff as do Mrs. Robison’s daughter Subrina Berger and her husband, Chris.

Dennis, who has a degree in business agriculture, has taken over operations of the family farm and built his home on the site where his grandparents once lived.

“Dennis has asked me when I am going to stop doing all the mowing. He says it is embarrassing when people want to know who mows his yard and he has to tell them his mother does,” she laughs. “Then they ask him, how old I am, and he has to tell them I am 91!”

Although most 91-year-old women are unable to take on the tasks she accomplishes with relative ease, Mrs. Robison enjoys excellent health, and has remarkable stamina and energy for a woman of her age and stature.

She creates and maintains her gardens because she can, and because she enjoys yard work.

“If something stops being enjoyable, I stop doing it,” she says.

She felt that way about oil painting, although she has a gallery of pictures and folk art projects that attest to her talent. But lest anyone accuse her of being a quitter, she also admits that she can’t leave a project undone. She will finish what she started, even if once having begun, she finds she hates it.

When she isn’t mowing, building or repairing something at the park, she finds other tasks for her creative talents and energies. She is a collector, and builds her own cabinetry to house her collections. She is also an accomplished seamstress who has to her credit, numerous award-winning quilts, all with blocks completely hand-stitched and then hand-quilted. She also makes custom drapery and bed ruffles to match some of the bedcovers she has made.

One of her quilts features T-shirts from 20 years of participation in senior Olympics, from the time she was 60 years old to age 80.

“I saw in the DAR that they were having the events in Poplar Bluff, and I decided I wanted to try it. I trained myself. I didn’t tell anyone what I was going to do, not even my husband. When I got there, I saw vehicles from 15 states. I had no idea it was going to be that big!” remembers Mrs. Robison. She almost went home, but thought, “I’ve come this far. I might as well stay.”

Mrs. Robison competed in the track and field events, which is what she’d trained for, as well as all the other events, including the javelin and discus tossing and basketball free-throw. She finished with either a bronze, silver or gold ribbon in each of the 19 events, and added to those a full trophy case of ribbons over the 20 years she participated. She competed in the speed walk event alongside Bonnie Davis of Doniphan, whom she recalls that she “sized up and decided she could out-walk,” because she used a walker. She laughs, “Bonnie was no slouch. I found that out about halfway across the ballfield. I had to kick it up a little bit.”

The competitions stopped being held in 2009, but the indomitable Grannie Joyce admits, “I’d probably still be competing if they hadn’t.”

That’s just one more thing about which she can tell her four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.