March is Women’s History Month. There are plenty of notable women out there. I would like to share the story of one who directly influenced my life.

I’ll tell you about a strong woman in history. That would be the first woman to work in a farm store as a “salesman”.
The first strong woman to do so at the Sevier Farmers Co-op was Tuletta Myers. I hope she doesn’t mind me writing about her; I didn’t ask permission.

Women had been working at the Co-op, but back then they just wrote tickets. You’d come in to shop and one of the men would lead you around and assist you with whatever you needed- bolts, a new washing machine, rake teeth, fine china. They’d cart your purchases to the counter where a lady (dressed in heels and a skirt) would hand write your ticket on carbon copied paper, then total it up on an adding machine.
Y’all just take a minute to picture that. I’ll wait.
Yeah.
But in the mid-eighties, things began to change with the introduction of the computer. And the Co-op evolved as well. I imagine it happened all over the state around the same time. And Tuletta was our hometown girl. She practically had to beg people to let her wait on them. Not the women, no, they were relieved to find a lady that wouldn’t treat them like they were incapable of understanding. It was the men who were uncomfortable telling a woman they needed palpation gloves or asking her advice on hardware. Heaven forbid a woman know something they didn’t!! The first thing everybody wanted to know was where she was from, who her people were. Luckily, she was from here and not a transplant from some God-forbidden place like Knoxville She became the top roofing salesperson in the state because nobody knew anything about it and nobody bothered to learn until she came along. She found her niche. She began to clean cobwebs from corners nobody had touched in years. She studied about machinery and saw to it that there was ample supply of mower blades and pitman arms to sell.
She didn’t know about tack, though. I was probably the only chick in the county riding English and I’d go in to order a pad or figure 8 noseband (this was in the days before mail order State Line Tack was popular or attainable to me) and she’d just hand me her catalog and a piece of paper and I’d find me a corner and make a list.
She paved the way for more women to come on board and for it to be “normal” for us to know about more than flowers and birdseed. She taught me so incredibly much and she never cut me an inch of slack. We all called her the Dragon Lady for good reason. She was respected and feared. I can still hear her, catching me chatting with a friend, “You got time to lean, you got time to clean!!!” Still sends a shiver down my spine. She said while you were cleaning, you were reading. She wasn’t wrong. You’d be so bored with wiping herbicide bottle after herbicide bottle you had no choice to figure out what it killed. She beat us all to the store and would be back in her office, smoking cigarettes like a diesel rolls and sorting through receiving documents in her Birkenstocks. She wouldn’t send a man in to do her work rooting for a misplaced item, she was on her feet and out the door before the words left your mouth. Tuletta was a trooper. She was a warrior of a man’s world. It wasn’t easy when I came to work the counter, but it helped she’d been there in that same spot, and she always has an ear to listen.

I hope y’all enjoyed the history lesson and I hope you were blessed to have needed and found Tuletta at some point during her tenure there. This is a great picture, displaying her dry humor and sarcasm. And she was in her element– INVENTORY.