local news. Photo Credit: Richard J. Patrick
By Levi Hobwood ‘27
“I remember looking up and seeing Danny push the brick off of the top, but he says the wind blew and pulled them off,” said Annette Hobwood. “But you know this is Danny [Annette’s oldest brother], and I don’t really believe his side of the story. So the brick fell right on my head.”
According to Mrs Hobwood, her brothers were making a tent on their swingset and decided to “…secure it with bricks.” As Hobwood was walking underneath the tent the bricks were falling off. Annette said depending on who you ask the story is different, but “I remember looking up and seeing Danny push the bricks off of the top.”
Both her brothers deny pushing the bricks. They say the wind blew and pulled the bricks off of the swingset. Either way, Hobwood was hit in the head with a brick and had to get “4 or 5 stitches.” She says she doesn’t know how anyone believed her brother’s story.
Her 2 brothers were not kind people growing up. Along with dropping bricks on her head, Danny, the oldest brother, would steal money from her. “He would make me do work and then not pay me, and then argue with me about having paid me, even though he knew he didn’t pay me,” said Hobwood.
Her other brother Jon was not any better. “He would learn new wrestling moves at practice, and then come home and have to show them to me, which means, like wrestling me to the ground,” Hobwood said. That may have been fine if they were little like 8 or 9 but they were in high school 16-17 years old, according to Hobwood.
“I got attacked by a squirrel, I don’t remember it,” Hobwood said. Then her brothers got her mom to get a toy with finger puppet squirrels. “They would chase me around with them. I would scream and cry.”
One of her two sisters Elizabeth (Beth) was sometimes an angel and sometimes one in the same with her brothers “Beth would terrorize me in my sleep because we had to share a room,” Hobwood said. She would shake the bed and scream, acting confused but still shaking the bed. On the other hand Beth “would read books to me until I fell asleep.”
The one saving grace was her oldest sister Jenna. “Jenna was so much older than me. I idolized her, and she would take me and do nice things with me,” said Hobwood.
Although her family may have been tough, she was able to work things out and get a job. She explained: “My first job was the paper routes.” Back when she did these paper routes she made $2 dollars a route. “I had more money than a lot of people. That was good money,” she said.
The paper routes was a family business, so her real first job was at Berks Water Technology. She was a telemarketer. She said it was fun but she doesn’t remember much about it. “If one of the cold calls that I made ended up in a water softener sale, I would get commission on that. But I don’t remember what I got paid per hour. It was probably like seven, something,”she said.
Her grandparents on her mother’s side weren’t around as much. Her father’s side were “very plain, Mennonite cape dress covering. I don’t remember having a whole lot of conversations with my grandmom, but I hung out with my grandpa a lot.”
She said that when she graduated high school “I took a loan out from my grandpa, and had to go visit him to pay him for the loan.” To pay it off she would visit him and “we would play cards together, and I would spend weekends at his house, and we work in the yard, garden together.”
Hobbies were far and few for Hobwood. “I didn’t have a lot of hobbies. I was thrown into a lot of responsibilities at a young age.” The few hobbies she would partake in were local Christian garage bands. There were CD’s from these garage bands but she barely bought them because “the CDs were…super poorly done,” Hobwood stated. “I might have had a Jump on Hill CD. …they had actually released two CDs. I had one of them.”
Although her childhood was tough like the brick falling on her head, she powered through and recovered into a wonderful person, and, from her son’s account, a great mom.