Loretta Lynn ‘never knew where babies came from’ until she became a mother
by admin ·
As the most awarded country music singer ever, a devoted wife, and mother to six children, Loretta Lynn had one heck of a journey.Read More
Growing up in the coal-mining hills of Kentucky, she was dirt poor – and her mother reportedly used Sears catalog pages as wallpaper.
She married Oliver “Mooney” Lynn when she was only 16 and, according to the girl herself, it took a while before she learned where babies came from …
Keep on reading to find out everything about ”the coal miner’s daughter” – and her sad, last words before she died…
Country legend Loretta Lynn was born April 14, 1932, in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, the second oldest of eight children. Her mother loved American actress Loretta Young and decided to name her daughter after her. Loretta’s father was a coal miner who died of black lung disease at 52.
Her family were poor by anyone’s standards, and Loretta’s early life was often tough.
”The winters were cold, so my mommy glued newspapers and pages from old Sears Roebuck catalogs to the wall to help keep the cold out. We didn’t have money for wallpaper, but my mommy made that old house stay warm and beautiful,” Loretta said.
She married first husband Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn when she was just 16 years old and he was 21. Loretta was a young stay-at-home-wife, and her husband worked as a logger to provide for the family.
The family eventually decided to move from Kentucky to the logging community of Custer, Washington. It was there Loretta suddenly started getting sick in the mornings – but had no idea why. She decided to see her doctor, who in turn asked her to get undressed.
”I just pulled the sheet over my head, like an ostrich. When he was done, Doc told me I could get dressed again. After that, he put his arm around my waist and he said, ’Honey, your trouble is, you’re pregnant,” Loretta explained in her book “Loretta Lynn: Coal Miner’s Daughter”.
The news came as shock for the young and innocent Loretta, still a minor at the time. She insisted that she didn’t know what the word pregnant meant, or where babies came from.
“I never knew where babies came from until it happened to me,” she once famously said.
Her first son, Jack, was born in December 1949. His birth story says a lot about the circumstances in which Loretta and her family lived. Because she couldn’t afford to stay at the hospital overnight, Loretta headed back home just hours after giving birth to Jack.
After her second baby, Loretta suffered two miscarriages. Unfortunately, the second miscarriage resulted in blood poisoning, and once again, she couldn’t afford to go to the hospital. She managed to survive, but it was a close run thing.
Despite it all, Loretta continued to fall pregnant. While expecting her third child, doctors said Loretta needed a Cesarean section. But there was a problem – she needed her husband’s signature to go through with the procedure.
Incredibly, since she was still a minor, she couldn’t sign her own consent form. This became a major problem as nobody could get a hold of her husband, Doolittle; he was out working in the woods. After being at the hospital for days, Loretta finally delivered her baby the natural way, and everything went fine.
“Doo called in from some logging camp and they kept teasing him. First they said it was a boy, then a girl, then a boy again. But it was a boy, and we named him Ernest Ray,” Loretta said.
Before the age of 20, Loretta had four children. As a stay-at-home mom, she barely went out (paying a babysitter wasn’t an option with the family’s estranged economic situation).
