Arnold R. Keaton
Arnold Roy Keaton, of Glasgow, passed away peacefully at home Sunday, July 26, 2009, in the company of family after battling pulmonary fibrosis. He was 61-years-old.
Born on July 3, 1948, in Hotchkiss, W.Va., Arnold was the son of the late Roy and Irma Cook Keaton. He grew up in Jumping Branch and lived in Beckley.
He served his country in the U.S. Air Force and worked as a Professional Engineer for Cannelton Coal Company as well as the State of West Virginia Bureau for Public Health.
He was an avid hunter and fisherman, enjoyed crossword puzzles, cryptograms, bluegrass music, Civil War research, genealogy, and Scrabble and collected antique mining paraphernalia.
Surviving Arnold are his wife, Rita Bower Keaton; his brothers, Wayne Russell Keaton and his wife, Linda, of Beckley, Daniel Raymond Keaton and his wife, Beth, of Beckley and Daniel’s mother, Shirley Keaton of White Oak; his sister, Joyce Elaine Keaton of Beckley; his three daughters, Martha Keaton Mills and her husband, Brad, of Charleston, Melissa Jane Keaton and fiancé, Chet Horton, of Charleston and Jessica Michelle Keaton and fiancé, Charlie Carl, of Charleston; two grandchildren, Katie and Andrew Mills; and his lifelong best friend, Jim Alderson.
Visitation will be held Thursday, July 30, 2009, from 6 to 9 p.m. at the Rose and Quesenberry Funeral Home in Beckley. Funeral services will be held at 1 p.m. on Friday, July 31, at Rose and Quesenberry in Beckley, officiated by the Rev. Dale Birchfield and assisted by Pastor James D. Fox. Burial will follow at the Lilly-Crews Cemetery at Nimitz, W.Va.
Pallbearers will be Lonnie Harvey, Bobby Cannon II, John Cannon, Ronnie Murdock, Ricky Young and Russell Keaton. Honorary pallbearers will be Carl Hackworth, Johnny Pack, Bobby Cannon, Bobby Mullins, Jim Alderson and Joe Overbay.
In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to either the American Diabetes Association or the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation. The family also requests that you consider becoming an organ donor.
Monday, October 24, 2011
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Musings
I thought we were a middle class family as I grew up. We always had food available and a dry place to sleep. It was often a cold place to sleep, but we had blankets. Our clothing sometimes had holes in it, but it was clean clothing. When I put on a sock that had a hole in the heel, I would pull the toe until the hole was under my heel, turn the toe under my foot, and then put my shoe on. We had all of life’s necessities, but there wasn’t a lot of money available for things we merely wanted. However, we did always have enough money to buy dog food. That says something about Daddy’s priorities. I don’t think they were bad priorities. Not having everything I wanted made me resolve to work hard so I could have them later in life when I was setting my own priorities.
Promises I made to myself:
I have really liked orange juice all of my life. Orange juice was not on Mommy’s standard shopping list. The only time we had orange juice was when somebody got sick. Daddy would buy a 46 ounce tin can of orange juice. I think the acid in the juice dissolved some of the tin can and changed its taste. Only the lucky person who was sick got to drink almost all of the juice. Those of us who were unlucky enough to be well got only a few small sips. I promised myself that I would work hard and get a job that paid enough for me to keep orange juice in my refrigerator all of the time. I would drink juice whenever I wanted to. I fulfilled that promise to myself. I drink orange juice or the equivalent (grape, grapefruit, pineapple) every morning for breakfast. That first taste of juice in the morning still reminds me to be thankful that I am rich enough to have juice every day.
Another promise I made to myself was that I would not hoe in a garden. I never did like hoeing the garden. My back would start hurting right off the bat. I would be miserable until I was able to stop hoeing. The worst times were after a mid-afternoon thundershower. It would sometimes rain only enough to dampen the top half-inch of the dirt in the garden. When the hot sun reappeared, Mommy would tell us to go back to work. It was useless and sometimes even perilous to complain or protest. The muddy dirt would stick to the hoe and to my fingers. After the mud had made each of my fingers about an inch in diameter, the gnats would come onto the scene. It is hard to scare gnats away from your face and ears using only your elbows. I wouldn’t use my hands because they were muddy.
When Mommy found a breakfast food that was inexpensive and easy to cook, she would feed it to us until we were tired of it and all but refused to eat it. That is what happened with oatmeal. The first five hundred gallons I ate was pretty good. The next five hundred gallons were still okay. I did not care much for the next one thousand gallons. I promised myself that I would not eat oatmeal until I wanted it. At this point in life, it is unlikely that I will ever eat another bowl of oatmeal.
I hear a lot of people complain about their job. They have to work too hard. Their boss is unreasonable. Their boss is stupid. The pay is too low. I think it was helpful for me to stop every once in a while and remember how I felt when I learned that I had been hired. That first day on the job was interesting and nice. I was glad to begin receiving a regular payday.
When I invited Daddy to my wedding, he asked me if I was sure I wanted to get married. I told him I was. He then said I should not get married until I just absolutely could not stand not being married. I was married later that day, but that’s another story.
Whenever two people are in a serious relationship, they tend to repress some of their thoughts and actions that they think might offend the other partner. Both of them keep this up until the wedding vows have been exchanged. Now, they are joined together and the other one can’t escape. Each one relaxes and stops holding back the behaviors that may have strained the relationship before the wedding. Each one begins instructing the other one what he/she needs to do to become the perfect spouse. Both are offended and each one thinks he/she is already the perfect spouse. It takes a lot of give and take to reach an acceptable middle ground. Some marriages die before that middle ground is reached.
People tend to become what they think other people think they are.
- - -
Promises I made to myself:
Orange Juice
I have really liked orange juice all of my life. Orange juice was not on Mommy’s standard shopping list. The only time we had orange juice was when somebody got sick. Daddy would buy a 46 ounce tin can of orange juice. I think the acid in the juice dissolved some of the tin can and changed its taste. Only the lucky person who was sick got to drink almost all of the juice. Those of us who were unlucky enough to be well got only a few small sips. I promised myself that I would work hard and get a job that paid enough for me to keep orange juice in my refrigerator all of the time. I would drink juice whenever I wanted to. I fulfilled that promise to myself. I drink orange juice or the equivalent (grape, grapefruit, pineapple) every morning for breakfast. That first taste of juice in the morning still reminds me to be thankful that I am rich enough to have juice every day.
Hoeing in the Garden
Another promise I made to myself was that I would not hoe in a garden. I never did like hoeing the garden. My back would start hurting right off the bat. I would be miserable until I was able to stop hoeing. The worst times were after a mid-afternoon thundershower. It would sometimes rain only enough to dampen the top half-inch of the dirt in the garden. When the hot sun reappeared, Mommy would tell us to go back to work. It was useless and sometimes even perilous to complain or protest. The muddy dirt would stick to the hoe and to my fingers. After the mud had made each of my fingers about an inch in diameter, the gnats would come onto the scene. It is hard to scare gnats away from your face and ears using only your elbows. I wouldn’t use my hands because they were muddy.
Oatmeal
When Mommy found a breakfast food that was inexpensive and easy to cook, she would feed it to us until we were tired of it and all but refused to eat it. That is what happened with oatmeal. The first five hundred gallons I ate was pretty good. The next five hundred gallons were still okay. I did not care much for the next one thousand gallons. I promised myself that I would not eat oatmeal until I wanted it. At this point in life, it is unlikely that I will ever eat another bowl of oatmeal.
- - -
I hear a lot of people complain about their job. They have to work too hard. Their boss is unreasonable. Their boss is stupid. The pay is too low. I think it was helpful for me to stop every once in a while and remember how I felt when I learned that I had been hired. That first day on the job was interesting and nice. I was glad to begin receiving a regular payday.
- - -
When I invited Daddy to my wedding, he asked me if I was sure I wanted to get married. I told him I was. He then said I should not get married until I just absolutely could not stand not being married. I was married later that day, but that’s another story.
Whenever two people are in a serious relationship, they tend to repress some of their thoughts and actions that they think might offend the other partner. Both of them keep this up until the wedding vows have been exchanged. Now, they are joined together and the other one can’t escape. Each one relaxes and stops holding back the behaviors that may have strained the relationship before the wedding. Each one begins instructing the other one what he/she needs to do to become the perfect spouse. Both are offended and each one thinks he/she is already the perfect spouse. It takes a lot of give and take to reach an acceptable middle ground. Some marriages die before that middle ground is reached.
- - -
People tend to become what they think other people think they are.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Johnny Mack Brown
Glen View, WV
1958
I was delivering my newspapers late one dusky evening when I heard a woman’s voice shouting, “Johnny, come home. It’s getting dark.” The woman was Mrs. Brown. She and her family lived in one of Virgil Gunther’s “three little houses”, as we called them. Mrs. Brown asked me if I had seen her son, Johnny. I told her I hadn’t. She asked if I would help her hunt for him.
I walked up into the woods behind her house and began looking around. I stopped for a rest, and heard a faint whimper. It sounded like the sound a wet, half-starved kitten might make. I couldn’t see anything that would make a noise like that. The sound appeared to be coming from a large log lying on the ground.
I walked up to the log and saw Johnny hiding behind the log. I was not ready for the sight and smell of Johnny. He had fallen through the hole in the outhouse. He had about a gallon of what I’ll call “outhouse gook” smeared on him. It was in his hair, on his face, on both hands, on his feet, and on his clothes. He was miserable. He didn’t want to go home because he knew his mother would not be happy. I told him he couldn’t stay in the woods all night. He agreed to go back home.
Johnny’s mother was happy to see her son, but unhappy with the chore ahead of her. I did not envy her or Johnny.
I can remember Johnny’s name because he was named for a cowboy movie star. From the accounts I read in the newspapers, Little Johnny became a juvenile delinquent and a career criminal. Falling into the toilet probably didn’t have much effect on his sense of right and wrong.
1958
I was delivering my newspapers late one dusky evening when I heard a woman’s voice shouting, “Johnny, come home. It’s getting dark.” The woman was Mrs. Brown. She and her family lived in one of Virgil Gunther’s “three little houses”, as we called them. Mrs. Brown asked me if I had seen her son, Johnny. I told her I hadn’t. She asked if I would help her hunt for him.
I walked up into the woods behind her house and began looking around. I stopped for a rest, and heard a faint whimper. It sounded like the sound a wet, half-starved kitten might make. I couldn’t see anything that would make a noise like that. The sound appeared to be coming from a large log lying on the ground.
I walked up to the log and saw Johnny hiding behind the log. I was not ready for the sight and smell of Johnny. He had fallen through the hole in the outhouse. He had about a gallon of what I’ll call “outhouse gook” smeared on him. It was in his hair, on his face, on both hands, on his feet, and on his clothes. He was miserable. He didn’t want to go home because he knew his mother would not be happy. I told him he couldn’t stay in the woods all night. He agreed to go back home.
Johnny’s mother was happy to see her son, but unhappy with the chore ahead of her. I did not envy her or Johnny.
I can remember Johnny’s name because he was named for a cowboy movie star. From the accounts I read in the newspapers, Little Johnny became a juvenile delinquent and a career criminal. Falling into the toilet probably didn’t have much effect on his sense of right and wrong.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Firecrackers
I was not generally allowed to possess firecrackers. However, as I got older, I got a little bolder.
One summer when I was about fourteen years old, I had somehow obtained a supply of cherry bombs. I probably got them from John W. Bower. As usual, things were pretty dull on the farm that day. I was looking for some excitement. I began to blow up cow patties. I was having a lot of fun doing that.
I spotted a large fresh pile in the road in front of our barn. There was a big apple tree about six or eight feet away. I stuck a cherry bomb in as far as I could without getting the fuse wet. My plan was to light the fuse and jump behind the apple tree for protection. The plan worked, sorta. I lit the fuse, made a beeline for the tree, and huddled behind it. I readied myself for the explosion, but it didn’t happen. I remembered that the fuse had stopped sparkling and was only glowing as I turned to take shelter. I told myself that I had to be careful. This had the potential makings of a gag in a Three Stooges movie. I waited. I waited some more. I finally determined that it was unlikely to go off because it had been several minutes since I had lit the fuse.
I took a quick peek and saw the cherry bomb still where I had left it, but the fuse had stopped burning before it got to the cherry bomb. I appraised the situation and determined that my original plan would probably still work, but with less room for error. The fuse was only about ¼ inch long, but it had been a slow-burning one.
I struck a match and held it against the fuse. The fuse began burning very fast as soon as it lit. I turned to run, but I was only one and a half steps away when the cherry bomb exploded. I felt a wet, gooey mess of fresh cow manure hit me on my back and on the back of my head.
There was nothing to do but get some soap and take a bath in the watering trough. The tee shirt I was wearing never did come clean. It had a green grass-stained back until it wore out.
I used to get two different sized tin cans and blow one of them ‘way up in the air. I would punch a hole in the bottom of the smaller can and put a firecracker in it as far as it would go without falling out. I would put a few inches of water in the larger can and put the smaller can upside down inside the larger can, with the firecracker fuse sticking up. When the firecracker would explode, the water in the bottom of the can prevented the gases from coming out that way. The only way the gases could get out was to hurl the smaller can upward. The can would often go out of sight. I sometimes ran for cover because I didn’t know where the can would come down.
I went on a camping trip to Bluestone Lake when I was about seventeen. I don’t want to implicate my friends, so I won’t mention any names. I was old enough to know better, but that doesn’t always mean much. I had firecrackers and beer. We drank some beer and decided to set some cherry bombs off at about 1:00 am. We were also laughing and talking very loudly. There were a lot of other campers around. I’m surprised we weren’t at least asked to hold the noise down.
The next day, I spied a carp in shallow water near a steep bank. I tied a cherry bomb to a rock and lit the fuse. I tried to time it so the firecracker would explode just as it entered the water. I must have got it right, because the carp turned belly up and didn’t swim away.
I flunked out at Marshall University my first year, so I was not allowed to return to school in the fall of 1965. I somehow found out a lot of my high school friends were planning a camping trip to Pipestem around Christmas. I caught a ride with Curtis Wilcox. Jim Alderson and I bought a fifth of Jim Beam to share. Others who attended were Ted Sentz (His dad owned the cabin), Bob Wyant, Charles Miller, Paul Adkins, and Gary Osborne.
I started drinking Jim Beam soon after we arrived. I was there to party. I was also not as wise as I am now. We ate supper and sat around in the cabin discussing news in our lives. I continued to drink Jim Beam all of this time. When Jim Alderson went to get a drink, he noticed that the bottle was a lot closer to empty than he thought it should be. He informed me that I had already had my share and that I couldn’t drink any more of his liquor.
A wet snow began falling after we had made preparations for bed. I remember standing out in the snow with nothing on but my underwear shorts and my boots. I would make a snowball around a cherry bomb and light it. Here comes the really dumb part—I would wait until the last second to throw the snowball. I was trying to get the cherry bomb to explode very soon after it left my hand. Very stupid behavior.
One summer when I was about fourteen years old, I had somehow obtained a supply of cherry bombs. I probably got them from John W. Bower. As usual, things were pretty dull on the farm that day. I was looking for some excitement. I began to blow up cow patties. I was having a lot of fun doing that.
I spotted a large fresh pile in the road in front of our barn. There was a big apple tree about six or eight feet away. I stuck a cherry bomb in as far as I could without getting the fuse wet. My plan was to light the fuse and jump behind the apple tree for protection. The plan worked, sorta. I lit the fuse, made a beeline for the tree, and huddled behind it. I readied myself for the explosion, but it didn’t happen. I remembered that the fuse had stopped sparkling and was only glowing as I turned to take shelter. I told myself that I had to be careful. This had the potential makings of a gag in a Three Stooges movie. I waited. I waited some more. I finally determined that it was unlikely to go off because it had been several minutes since I had lit the fuse.
I took a quick peek and saw the cherry bomb still where I had left it, but the fuse had stopped burning before it got to the cherry bomb. I appraised the situation and determined that my original plan would probably still work, but with less room for error. The fuse was only about ¼ inch long, but it had been a slow-burning one.
I struck a match and held it against the fuse. The fuse began burning very fast as soon as it lit. I turned to run, but I was only one and a half steps away when the cherry bomb exploded. I felt a wet, gooey mess of fresh cow manure hit me on my back and on the back of my head.
There was nothing to do but get some soap and take a bath in the watering trough. The tee shirt I was wearing never did come clean. It had a green grass-stained back until it wore out.
I used to get two different sized tin cans and blow one of them ‘way up in the air. I would punch a hole in the bottom of the smaller can and put a firecracker in it as far as it would go without falling out. I would put a few inches of water in the larger can and put the smaller can upside down inside the larger can, with the firecracker fuse sticking up. When the firecracker would explode, the water in the bottom of the can prevented the gases from coming out that way. The only way the gases could get out was to hurl the smaller can upward. The can would often go out of sight. I sometimes ran for cover because I didn’t know where the can would come down.
I went on a camping trip to Bluestone Lake when I was about seventeen. I don’t want to implicate my friends, so I won’t mention any names. I was old enough to know better, but that doesn’t always mean much. I had firecrackers and beer. We drank some beer and decided to set some cherry bombs off at about 1:00 am. We were also laughing and talking very loudly. There were a lot of other campers around. I’m surprised we weren’t at least asked to hold the noise down.
The next day, I spied a carp in shallow water near a steep bank. I tied a cherry bomb to a rock and lit the fuse. I tried to time it so the firecracker would explode just as it entered the water. I must have got it right, because the carp turned belly up and didn’t swim away.
I flunked out at Marshall University my first year, so I was not allowed to return to school in the fall of 1965. I somehow found out a lot of my high school friends were planning a camping trip to Pipestem around Christmas. I caught a ride with Curtis Wilcox. Jim Alderson and I bought a fifth of Jim Beam to share. Others who attended were Ted Sentz (His dad owned the cabin), Bob Wyant, Charles Miller, Paul Adkins, and Gary Osborne.
I started drinking Jim Beam soon after we arrived. I was there to party. I was also not as wise as I am now. We ate supper and sat around in the cabin discussing news in our lives. I continued to drink Jim Beam all of this time. When Jim Alderson went to get a drink, he noticed that the bottle was a lot closer to empty than he thought it should be. He informed me that I had already had my share and that I couldn’t drink any more of his liquor.
A wet snow began falling after we had made preparations for bed. I remember standing out in the snow with nothing on but my underwear shorts and my boots. I would make a snowball around a cherry bomb and light it. Here comes the really dumb part—I would wait until the last second to throw the snowball. I was trying to get the cherry bomb to explode very soon after it left my hand. Very stupid behavior.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Thermos Bottle
Age 8
One summer day I didn’t have much to do, so I decided to do a little exploring. I went around the hill from the barn behind our house at Glen View and I walked up the hill onto Mrs. Polk’s property. I discovered a trash dump that I did not know was there. Most of the stuff in the pile was rusty tin cans or glass bottles that did not interest me. I spied a thermos bottle down in the pile. Keep in mind, this was before stainless steel thermos bottles were available. I expected the double-walled glass liner to be broken (the normal mode of failure), but it wasn’t. It still had the cork that kept the contents from leaking out. The paint on the outer metal cover had been faded by the sun. I don’t know why somebody discarded what seemed to be a perfectly good thermos bottle. I had seen thermos bottles at some friends’ houses, but we were too poor to have such a luxury. Mommy didn’t fix any coffee for Daddy to drink at work. She put ice water in the bottom of his dinner bucket.
When I took the thermos bottle home, Mommy was not impressed. She asked me to throw it away, as it surely had some defect that we hadn’t found yet. She relented when I begged her to let me wash it thoroughly with soap and bleach.
After I had scrubbed it, Mommy inspected it and passed it. I immediately put some ice and water in it and went to what was then my favorite place to be alone. A large white oak tree past the cellar had a horizontal limb that was straight and parallel to the ground that I could lie on. The level portion was about five feet long and two feet wide and it was about ten feet above the ground. It wasn’t easy to climb up to it, but I was pretty agile then. I climbed up to my limb and pretended to be a big shot, drinking a little ice water from time to time.
After about an hour, I decided to climb down and be a big-shot somewhere else. Without thinking, I dropped the thermos bottle to the ground so I could climb down easier. I realized what I had done about half a second too late. When I picked it up, it sounded like it had three or four broken light bulbs swishing around in the water. Believe it or not, I did learn a little bit from that experience. I learned to take care of my valuables a little better. That was the end of my time as a big shot that summer.
One summer day I didn’t have much to do, so I decided to do a little exploring. I went around the hill from the barn behind our house at Glen View and I walked up the hill onto Mrs. Polk’s property. I discovered a trash dump that I did not know was there. Most of the stuff in the pile was rusty tin cans or glass bottles that did not interest me. I spied a thermos bottle down in the pile. Keep in mind, this was before stainless steel thermos bottles were available. I expected the double-walled glass liner to be broken (the normal mode of failure), but it wasn’t. It still had the cork that kept the contents from leaking out. The paint on the outer metal cover had been faded by the sun. I don’t know why somebody discarded what seemed to be a perfectly good thermos bottle. I had seen thermos bottles at some friends’ houses, but we were too poor to have such a luxury. Mommy didn’t fix any coffee for Daddy to drink at work. She put ice water in the bottom of his dinner bucket.
When I took the thermos bottle home, Mommy was not impressed. She asked me to throw it away, as it surely had some defect that we hadn’t found yet. She relented when I begged her to let me wash it thoroughly with soap and bleach.
After I had scrubbed it, Mommy inspected it and passed it. I immediately put some ice and water in it and went to what was then my favorite place to be alone. A large white oak tree past the cellar had a horizontal limb that was straight and parallel to the ground that I could lie on. The level portion was about five feet long and two feet wide and it was about ten feet above the ground. It wasn’t easy to climb up to it, but I was pretty agile then. I climbed up to my limb and pretended to be a big shot, drinking a little ice water from time to time.
After about an hour, I decided to climb down and be a big-shot somewhere else. Without thinking, I dropped the thermos bottle to the ground so I could climb down easier. I realized what I had done about half a second too late. When I picked it up, it sounded like it had three or four broken light bulbs swishing around in the water. Believe it or not, I did learn a little bit from that experience. I learned to take care of my valuables a little better. That was the end of my time as a big shot that summer.
Monday, October 17, 2011
Crows
Age 13-15
Crows were considered vermin on our farm. They would pull freshly-sprouted corn up and eat it. They would eat other crops too when they had an opportunity.
Crows are smarter than most people think. I read an article in an outdoors magazine about a farmer who was having trouble with a crow that was raiding his corn crib. The farmer would sit in the corn crib with his shotgun and try to ambush the crow, but the crow wouldn’t come around while the farmer was in the corn crib. As soon as the farmer would give up and go back to his house, the crow would return.
The farmer decided to try to outwit the crow. He asked a neighbor to accompany him to the corn crib and stay about fifteen minutes. The crow would see his neighbor leave and think the coast was clear. The farmer would remain inside so he could kill the crow. It didn’t work. The farmer gave up after two hours and returned home. The crow returned and ate his fill of corn.
The next day, the farmer took two of his neighbors to the corn crib. After they had been there fifteen minutes, the two neighbors left. The crow still would not come around while the farmer was in the corn crib.
The farmer changed clothes and took three of his neighbors. Still the crow would not come around until the farmer left. He kept increasing the number of people who would accompany him. Finally, he took eighteen people with him. After they left the corn crib, the crow flew in thinking the corn crib was safe. That was a fatal mistake.
Reading the article described above seemed reasonable to me. I had already learned that crows are smart. We planted about an acre of corn close to the line fence the summer I turned fourteen. Crows attacked the crop as it sprouted, but stopped until the corn started making cobs of corn. Daddy told me to do whatever I could to kill the crows.
When I would come out of our house with a shotgun in my hands, any crows within 200 yards would fly away well before I could get close enough to shoot them. The only successful strategy for me was to arise before daylight and sit in the cornfield until the crows arrived. The crows would send one or two scouts ahead minutes after daylight to make sure there was no danger to the rest of the flock of about 20 birds. The scouts would always land on a limb of a dead locust tree that was higher than the surrounding trees. I would have perhaps five seconds to shoot one of the scouts. Sometimes I got one and sometimes I didn’t. It was a learning process.
One summer day I saw a crow behind a rail fence around our pasture field. I thought there might be a slight chance I could kill it. I got a shotgun and held it against my body so the crow wouldn’t be able to see it unless he had xray vision. I walked out the yard gate like I was going to our truck. As soon as the chicken house blocked my view of the crow, I walked directly toward the chicken house. My plan was to step out from behind the chicken house with my gun already at my shoulder and the safety off. I would shoot the crow as it took flight. I stepped out and almost pulled the trigger right away, but something stopped me from shooting. Something wasn’t right because a crow would have flown immediately after I stepped into his view. Maybe the firearm safety rules Daddy taught me kept me from shooting. I soon discovered that our Holstein cow, Star, was lying on the other side of the fence. She was fighting flies by moving her ears. If I had pulled the trigger, I probably would not have lived past adolescence. Daddy would have killed me.
Crows were considered vermin on our farm. They would pull freshly-sprouted corn up and eat it. They would eat other crops too when they had an opportunity.
Crows are smarter than most people think. I read an article in an outdoors magazine about a farmer who was having trouble with a crow that was raiding his corn crib. The farmer would sit in the corn crib with his shotgun and try to ambush the crow, but the crow wouldn’t come around while the farmer was in the corn crib. As soon as the farmer would give up and go back to his house, the crow would return.
The farmer decided to try to outwit the crow. He asked a neighbor to accompany him to the corn crib and stay about fifteen minutes. The crow would see his neighbor leave and think the coast was clear. The farmer would remain inside so he could kill the crow. It didn’t work. The farmer gave up after two hours and returned home. The crow returned and ate his fill of corn.
The next day, the farmer took two of his neighbors to the corn crib. After they had been there fifteen minutes, the two neighbors left. The crow still would not come around while the farmer was in the corn crib.
The farmer changed clothes and took three of his neighbors. Still the crow would not come around until the farmer left. He kept increasing the number of people who would accompany him. Finally, he took eighteen people with him. After they left the corn crib, the crow flew in thinking the corn crib was safe. That was a fatal mistake.
Reading the article described above seemed reasonable to me. I had already learned that crows are smart. We planted about an acre of corn close to the line fence the summer I turned fourteen. Crows attacked the crop as it sprouted, but stopped until the corn started making cobs of corn. Daddy told me to do whatever I could to kill the crows.
When I would come out of our house with a shotgun in my hands, any crows within 200 yards would fly away well before I could get close enough to shoot them. The only successful strategy for me was to arise before daylight and sit in the cornfield until the crows arrived. The crows would send one or two scouts ahead minutes after daylight to make sure there was no danger to the rest of the flock of about 20 birds. The scouts would always land on a limb of a dead locust tree that was higher than the surrounding trees. I would have perhaps five seconds to shoot one of the scouts. Sometimes I got one and sometimes I didn’t. It was a learning process.
One summer day I saw a crow behind a rail fence around our pasture field. I thought there might be a slight chance I could kill it. I got a shotgun and held it against my body so the crow wouldn’t be able to see it unless he had xray vision. I walked out the yard gate like I was going to our truck. As soon as the chicken house blocked my view of the crow, I walked directly toward the chicken house. My plan was to step out from behind the chicken house with my gun already at my shoulder and the safety off. I would shoot the crow as it took flight. I stepped out and almost pulled the trigger right away, but something stopped me from shooting. Something wasn’t right because a crow would have flown immediately after I stepped into his view. Maybe the firearm safety rules Daddy taught me kept me from shooting. I soon discovered that our Holstein cow, Star, was lying on the other side of the fence. She was fighting flies by moving her ears. If I had pulled the trigger, I probably would not have lived past adolescence. Daddy would have killed me.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Cows
Age 12-15
I was afraid of cows as a very small child. The story that follows is what Daddy told me several years later.
While we were visiting at Grandpa Keaton’s house, his cow named Gail had recently had a calf. The newly born calf had laid down while Old Gail was picking grass a some distance away. The adults on the front porch decided to walk down and take a look at the new calf. I don’t remember the incident, so I was probably younger than four years old. While we were looking at the calf, Gail came running to protect her calf. The adults started walking back to the house, but nobody told me that I should go with them. Somebody saw Gail running toward me like she wanted to stomp me into the mud. I was apparently rescued at the last second.
I was not around cows very much until Daddy bought one. We had moved to the farm at Jumping Branch and Daddy decided we needed a cow. I was twelve years old. He bought one from somebody he worked with. The cow was a Jersey- Guernsey named “Pet”. The person who named her had a sick sense of humor. If that cow was a pet, I am a jet pilot.
Daddy knew somebody who had a truck set up to haul cattle, so he arranged to have Pet picked up near Sophia and delivered to Jumping Branch. It was spring, and the road to our house was very muddy. It was a warm, sunny day, but the road was very muddy. Daddy told the man driving the truck that he shouldn’t try to drive all the way to our farm because the road was too muddy. I don’t remember why, but Frank Cook was with Daddy and me. When the cow had been unloaded, Daddy told us to drive her through the Bower farm and onto our farm which was almost a mile away. I was wearing 4-buckle arctics, but Frank was wearing black slippers. He was trying to keep them clean, but it was an impossible task. “Pet” didn’t like doing what we wanted her to. She had a mind of her own. We were eventually able to get her to walk through our gate. Frank had to wear muddy shoes until he got home.
Pet wore a halter, a leather contraption that is buckled around a cow’s head so the cow can be restrained. The man who sold Pet to Daddy told him that he would have to tie a rope to a fence post and hook it to the halter before Pet would allow anybody to milk her. He was right. Getting Pet to the fence post was sometimes a problem. We usually had to lure her to the fence post with some cow feed.
Mommy milked the cow for several weeks. I can’t remember how long it was before she told me I was old enough to milk. I was assigned the chore of milking her each evening while school was in session. On weekends and while school was not in session, I was usually responsible for milking her twice each day. This is when I learned that Pet liked to kick. Mommy showed me how to put the milk bucket about ten feet away so the cow wouldn’t step in it. We milked into a pot (saucepan for some of you) and poured milk into the bucket when the pot was full. Her milk was rich and contained a lot of cream. Cream was churned to produce butter and buttermilk.
Daddy bought a device that claimed to prevent cows from kicking. It was two pieces of pipe about an inch in diameter, bent in an arc. It had a crank that could be tightened to force the bottom ends of the pipe against her belly, just in front of her hind legs. We used it sometimes when Pet got hard to control.
We did not have a bull. Whenever Pet came into heat and wanted a boyfriend, she would try to find one. There were several instances when I could not find Pet to milk her. That was my cue to walk our fence lines and try to figure out where she had escaped. If this happened in the evening hours, I would get a carbide lamp and start tracking her. Finding her was relatively easy compared to driving her back to our farm. She knew we didn’t keep any boyfriends and she wanted one. It sometimes took hours to single-handedly drive her back through a hole in our fence.
On one memorable occasion, she had been down around some cliffs in the woods behind our house. It took me most of the night to find her. It was already daylight when I was able to drive her back to our fence. The closest fence was in the upper right hand corner of our pasture field. The fence there was a rail fence about three feet high with a single strand of rusty barbed wire nailed to the top rails. I removed several rails and laid them on top of the barbed wire. I thought the barbed wire was low enough to let her walk over the wire without hurting herself. Well, I was mistaken. I was also tired of chasing that crazy cow all night. She balked and didn’t want to go through the hole in the fence I had made. I grabbed a big stick and whacked her on the behind. She snagged her right front teat on the rusty barbed wire. She had a nasty wound in the area where the teat connected to her udder.
Cows are normally milked twice a day. Pet hadn’t been milked for 24 hours, so I had to milk her right away. She didn’t like being back home and I wasn’t too happy either. She kicked a few times, especially when I milked the wounded teat. About three or four days later, she had formed a hard scab over the wound. Like I said before, she had to be tied to a fence post before she would stand to be milked. I tried to be as gentle as I could when I milked the wounded teat. It had to be milked. The pot I milked into was almost full, and the foam was getting ready to run down the outside of the pot when Pet kicked. Her right rear foot contacted the bottom of my pot. That full pot of milk was hurled into my face.
One evening, when the mosquitoes and flies were especially bad, Pet would swing her tail to make them fly every few seconds. She dragged her tail through the milk in the pot a few times. Her wet tail would sometimes flick me on the ear like a wet dishrag. I had an idea how I could solve the problem. I tied a knot in her tail. That idea was not a good one. When she next swung her tail, the knot hit me in the head and almost knocked me down. I then tied her tail to the fence using the long hair at the end of her tail. She wasn’t happy about it, but there wasn’t anything she could do but let the insects bite.
One evening Wayne accompanied me to milk Old Pet. I had read Mark Twain’s novel, Tom Sawyer, and I thought I would see if I could emulate Tom Sawyer. I asked Wayne, “Won’t you be glad when you get old enough to milk?”
Wayne’s reply was, “I could milk now if I wanted to.”
“No, you’re not old enough yet.”
“Yes I am.”
“Show me.”
He was able to get milk out of Old Pet. When we got back to the house, I told Mommy that Wayne knew how to milk. That meant that I didn’t have to be home every evening to milk. It allowed me to participate in more after-school functions. I usually had to hitchhike, but that’s another story.
After we had milked Pet for a while, Daddy decided we needed another cow. When we turned one cow dry before she was going to have a calf, we would have another cow to provide milk and butter. Daddy asked Earl Bower to buy him a calf at the Caldwell Livestock Market. Old Star was a Holstein just a few weeks old. She cost $18.00. After she had her first calf, Joyce and Wayne milked her. Although her teats were smaller than Pet’s, the holes in her teats were quite a bit larger in diameter. Extracting milk from her was much easier than milking Old Pet. However, her milk had much less cream than Old Pet’s milk.
Daddy decided to keep one of Pet’s calves for a milk cow and sell Pet. We did try to make the calf a pet. It would stand in a field and let us walk up to it and pet it. However, she turned into a completely different cow immediately after she had her first calf. She wouldn’t stand so we could milk her. She would run from us. After a few days of that, Daddy sent her to the Caldwell Livestock Market.
Daddy sometimes asked Earl Bower to buy him a young calf at the Caldwell Livestock Market. We could usually get our cows to allow them to give them milk. As the calves grew, they competed for the milk we needed. Daddy bought a metal bucket that had a rubber teat connected to it at the bottom. We would mix a white powder with water, hang the bucket on a fence post, and let the calf get nourishment from that bucket.
I was afraid of cows as a very small child. The story that follows is what Daddy told me several years later.
While we were visiting at Grandpa Keaton’s house, his cow named Gail had recently had a calf. The newly born calf had laid down while Old Gail was picking grass a some distance away. The adults on the front porch decided to walk down and take a look at the new calf. I don’t remember the incident, so I was probably younger than four years old. While we were looking at the calf, Gail came running to protect her calf. The adults started walking back to the house, but nobody told me that I should go with them. Somebody saw Gail running toward me like she wanted to stomp me into the mud. I was apparently rescued at the last second.
I was not around cows very much until Daddy bought one. We had moved to the farm at Jumping Branch and Daddy decided we needed a cow. I was twelve years old. He bought one from somebody he worked with. The cow was a Jersey- Guernsey named “Pet”. The person who named her had a sick sense of humor. If that cow was a pet, I am a jet pilot.
Daddy knew somebody who had a truck set up to haul cattle, so he arranged to have Pet picked up near Sophia and delivered to Jumping Branch. It was spring, and the road to our house was very muddy. It was a warm, sunny day, but the road was very muddy. Daddy told the man driving the truck that he shouldn’t try to drive all the way to our farm because the road was too muddy. I don’t remember why, but Frank Cook was with Daddy and me. When the cow had been unloaded, Daddy told us to drive her through the Bower farm and onto our farm which was almost a mile away. I was wearing 4-buckle arctics, but Frank was wearing black slippers. He was trying to keep them clean, but it was an impossible task. “Pet” didn’t like doing what we wanted her to. She had a mind of her own. We were eventually able to get her to walk through our gate. Frank had to wear muddy shoes until he got home.
Pet wore a halter, a leather contraption that is buckled around a cow’s head so the cow can be restrained. The man who sold Pet to Daddy told him that he would have to tie a rope to a fence post and hook it to the halter before Pet would allow anybody to milk her. He was right. Getting Pet to the fence post was sometimes a problem. We usually had to lure her to the fence post with some cow feed.
Mommy milked the cow for several weeks. I can’t remember how long it was before she told me I was old enough to milk. I was assigned the chore of milking her each evening while school was in session. On weekends and while school was not in session, I was usually responsible for milking her twice each day. This is when I learned that Pet liked to kick. Mommy showed me how to put the milk bucket about ten feet away so the cow wouldn’t step in it. We milked into a pot (saucepan for some of you) and poured milk into the bucket when the pot was full. Her milk was rich and contained a lot of cream. Cream was churned to produce butter and buttermilk.
Daddy bought a device that claimed to prevent cows from kicking. It was two pieces of pipe about an inch in diameter, bent in an arc. It had a crank that could be tightened to force the bottom ends of the pipe against her belly, just in front of her hind legs. We used it sometimes when Pet got hard to control.
We did not have a bull. Whenever Pet came into heat and wanted a boyfriend, she would try to find one. There were several instances when I could not find Pet to milk her. That was my cue to walk our fence lines and try to figure out where she had escaped. If this happened in the evening hours, I would get a carbide lamp and start tracking her. Finding her was relatively easy compared to driving her back to our farm. She knew we didn’t keep any boyfriends and she wanted one. It sometimes took hours to single-handedly drive her back through a hole in our fence.
On one memorable occasion, she had been down around some cliffs in the woods behind our house. It took me most of the night to find her. It was already daylight when I was able to drive her back to our fence. The closest fence was in the upper right hand corner of our pasture field. The fence there was a rail fence about three feet high with a single strand of rusty barbed wire nailed to the top rails. I removed several rails and laid them on top of the barbed wire. I thought the barbed wire was low enough to let her walk over the wire without hurting herself. Well, I was mistaken. I was also tired of chasing that crazy cow all night. She balked and didn’t want to go through the hole in the fence I had made. I grabbed a big stick and whacked her on the behind. She snagged her right front teat on the rusty barbed wire. She had a nasty wound in the area where the teat connected to her udder.
Cows are normally milked twice a day. Pet hadn’t been milked for 24 hours, so I had to milk her right away. She didn’t like being back home and I wasn’t too happy either. She kicked a few times, especially when I milked the wounded teat. About three or four days later, she had formed a hard scab over the wound. Like I said before, she had to be tied to a fence post before she would stand to be milked. I tried to be as gentle as I could when I milked the wounded teat. It had to be milked. The pot I milked into was almost full, and the foam was getting ready to run down the outside of the pot when Pet kicked. Her right rear foot contacted the bottom of my pot. That full pot of milk was hurled into my face.
One evening, when the mosquitoes and flies were especially bad, Pet would swing her tail to make them fly every few seconds. She dragged her tail through the milk in the pot a few times. Her wet tail would sometimes flick me on the ear like a wet dishrag. I had an idea how I could solve the problem. I tied a knot in her tail. That idea was not a good one. When she next swung her tail, the knot hit me in the head and almost knocked me down. I then tied her tail to the fence using the long hair at the end of her tail. She wasn’t happy about it, but there wasn’t anything she could do but let the insects bite.
One evening Wayne accompanied me to milk Old Pet. I had read Mark Twain’s novel, Tom Sawyer, and I thought I would see if I could emulate Tom Sawyer. I asked Wayne, “Won’t you be glad when you get old enough to milk?”
Wayne’s reply was, “I could milk now if I wanted to.”
“No, you’re not old enough yet.”
“Yes I am.”
“Show me.”
He was able to get milk out of Old Pet. When we got back to the house, I told Mommy that Wayne knew how to milk. That meant that I didn’t have to be home every evening to milk. It allowed me to participate in more after-school functions. I usually had to hitchhike, but that’s another story.
After we had milked Pet for a while, Daddy decided we needed another cow. When we turned one cow dry before she was going to have a calf, we would have another cow to provide milk and butter. Daddy asked Earl Bower to buy him a calf at the Caldwell Livestock Market. Old Star was a Holstein just a few weeks old. She cost $18.00. After she had her first calf, Joyce and Wayne milked her. Although her teats were smaller than Pet’s, the holes in her teats were quite a bit larger in diameter. Extracting milk from her was much easier than milking Old Pet. However, her milk had much less cream than Old Pet’s milk.
Daddy decided to keep one of Pet’s calves for a milk cow and sell Pet. We did try to make the calf a pet. It would stand in a field and let us walk up to it and pet it. However, she turned into a completely different cow immediately after she had her first calf. She wouldn’t stand so we could milk her. She would run from us. After a few days of that, Daddy sent her to the Caldwell Livestock Market.
Daddy sometimes asked Earl Bower to buy him a young calf at the Caldwell Livestock Market. We could usually get our cows to allow them to give them milk. As the calves grew, they competed for the milk we needed. Daddy bought a metal bucket that had a rubber teat connected to it at the bottom. We would mix a white powder with water, hang the bucket on a fence post, and let the calf get nourishment from that bucket.
Friday, October 14, 2011
The Bus Incident
Yes, I do know Jackie Whittaker the Powerball lottery winner. He rode the same school bus that I did. For a while.
Before I get into the story, here's a little background for you....
I did not have a lot of clothing while I was growing up. Each year before school started, I would usually get three new shirts and three new pairs of pants. There were many days when I wouldn't pull my sock all of the way onto my foot so I could fold the toe under and hide the hole in the heel of my sock. Sometimes the sole on one of my shoes would come loose and I'd have to live with it flopping as I walked until I could get some money for the shoe repairman.
I got a new gray flannel coat when I was in the 9th grade. By the time I had finished the 11th grade, the sleeves on that coat were about 4 or 5 inches too short. I really wanted a trench coat like all of the cool guys at school wore. I couldn't talk my mother into buying a tan coat like I wanted (we lived on a farm and she thought a tan coat would show dirt more easily), but she did agree to buy me a black plaid trench coat. It came from Sears & Roebuck and cost $27.50 + tax. I was so proud of my new coat.
The event I'm about to describe took place on a day when we got out of school around noon. I don't remember if it was the end of the semester or what. Anyway, I was sitting near the back of the bus on the left side and next to the aisle. Somebody behind me flipped the collar up on my coat. I put it back down. Somebody flipped it back up. I put it back down. This went on for maybe 8 or 10 times. I got tired of it and decided to turn around to see who was messing with the collar on my coat. I turned to my left and saw that Jackie Whittaker was sitting behind me. He was the "bully of the bus". He's older than I am, but he was a grade or two behind me. At the time, he was quite a bit bigger than I was -- I weighed about 130 pounds at that stage in my life and Jackie probably weighed 175 pounds and was 3 or 4 inches taller than I was. We stared at each other for a little while. I turned back around. Up went the collar again. I turned back around.
Jackie and I stared at each other again. I turned back around. Up with the collar. This time, when I got about 2/3 of the way turned around, Jackie popped me on the cheek with his fist . I don't know why he hit me. I hadn't threatened him verbally or physically. I didn't have hitting anybody on my mind. I just wanted whoever was messing with my collar to leave me alone. After Jackie hit me, I gave him a pretty good lick to his cheek. We glared at each other for probably half a mile. It seemed like 80 or 90 miles to me. My recollection is that you could have heard a pin drop on the bus. Either that or I was concentrating on Jackie so hard that I blocked out any noise. I eventually decided I didn't want to ride all of the way home facing backwards, so I turned around so that I was facing forward again.
Well, within 15 seconds, guess what? Yep. Somebody flipped my collar up again. I don't know if Jackie was messing with my collar or not. I turned around again. The same thing happened. Jackie hit me in the face with his fist as I was turning around and I hit him in the face. This time, he made a near-fatal mistake. He grabbed the front of my coat near the top button and I heard my coat tear. He could have mopped the aisle on the bus with me if he hadn't torn my coat. I lost all traces of my self control within half of a second. I went absolutely berserk. It was like a dam had burst. The only time Jackie hit me that day was the first two as I was turning around. After he tore my coat, I didn't give him any more opportunities. I don't know how many times I hit him, but I would guess 30 or 40. I don't remember why I stopped hitting him, but I eventually did. I didn't remember until it was over that I had just got my senior ring a few days before. Jackie's face was pretty bloody and his pride was badly bruised.
I'm sure Frank Arthur, the bus driver, saw what happened. After the fight was over, Frank asked Jackie what was wrong. Jackie replied, "Just a little bit of high blood pressure back here." Jackie started running his mouth telling me how he was going to whip my ass good when I got off the bus. I told him he was welcome to try. I was pumped. I told Jackie all he had to do was tell Frank to stop the bus and we'd finish it. Man, I was hot!!! Jackie told Frank to stop the bus so we could get off. Frank stopped the bus at D. B. Abshire's Gulf station in the western end of downtown Jumping Branch. That wasn't a regular stop and we were the only two that got off.
As the school bus pulled out, Jackie said he didn't really want to fight any more. I told him either way was okay with me. If he was going to fight, bring it on. If not, I was going home. He started walking home -- he was probably two miles from his house. I hung around the filling station a few minutes so I wouldn't have to walk with him the 150 yards to the road we lived on.
My dad worked the evening shift and he was almost ready to go to work when I got home. I think my brother and sister had arrived before I did and told Daddy I had been in a fight. When I got home, I described what had happened. He told me that he didn't think fighting was the preferred way to solve problems. I was disappointed because I had just beaten up on a bully that was a lot bigger and meaner than I was. I felt really good about it. I wanted to tell everybody that I had whipped up on a no-good son of a bitch. (Daddy talked to a Mr. Plumley who lived close to Jackie a few months later. Mr. Plumley told Daddy that he was glad to hear that somebody had brought Jackie down a notch or two. Daddy did have a little bit of a grin on his face when he told me about his conversation with Mr. Plumley.)
Anyway, to get to the point of this story, Jackie never did come back to school. I couldn't believe it. I guess I had shamed him in front of everybody on the bus and he couldn't bear to face his buddies again. Several years later, I heard that he had gone into the business of boring holes under roadways for sewer & water lines.
Before I get into the story, here's a little background for you....
I did not have a lot of clothing while I was growing up. Each year before school started, I would usually get three new shirts and three new pairs of pants. There were many days when I wouldn't pull my sock all of the way onto my foot so I could fold the toe under and hide the hole in the heel of my sock. Sometimes the sole on one of my shoes would come loose and I'd have to live with it flopping as I walked until I could get some money for the shoe repairman.
I got a new gray flannel coat when I was in the 9th grade. By the time I had finished the 11th grade, the sleeves on that coat were about 4 or 5 inches too short. I really wanted a trench coat like all of the cool guys at school wore. I couldn't talk my mother into buying a tan coat like I wanted (we lived on a farm and she thought a tan coat would show dirt more easily), but she did agree to buy me a black plaid trench coat. It came from Sears & Roebuck and cost $27.50 + tax. I was so proud of my new coat.
The event I'm about to describe took place on a day when we got out of school around noon. I don't remember if it was the end of the semester or what. Anyway, I was sitting near the back of the bus on the left side and next to the aisle. Somebody behind me flipped the collar up on my coat. I put it back down. Somebody flipped it back up. I put it back down. This went on for maybe 8 or 10 times. I got tired of it and decided to turn around to see who was messing with the collar on my coat. I turned to my left and saw that Jackie Whittaker was sitting behind me. He was the "bully of the bus". He's older than I am, but he was a grade or two behind me. At the time, he was quite a bit bigger than I was -- I weighed about 130 pounds at that stage in my life and Jackie probably weighed 175 pounds and was 3 or 4 inches taller than I was. We stared at each other for a little while. I turned back around. Up went the collar again. I turned back around.
Jackie and I stared at each other again. I turned back around. Up with the collar. This time, when I got about 2/3 of the way turned around, Jackie popped me on the cheek with his fist . I don't know why he hit me. I hadn't threatened him verbally or physically. I didn't have hitting anybody on my mind. I just wanted whoever was messing with my collar to leave me alone. After Jackie hit me, I gave him a pretty good lick to his cheek. We glared at each other for probably half a mile. It seemed like 80 or 90 miles to me. My recollection is that you could have heard a pin drop on the bus. Either that or I was concentrating on Jackie so hard that I blocked out any noise. I eventually decided I didn't want to ride all of the way home facing backwards, so I turned around so that I was facing forward again.
Well, within 15 seconds, guess what? Yep. Somebody flipped my collar up again. I don't know if Jackie was messing with my collar or not. I turned around again. The same thing happened. Jackie hit me in the face with his fist as I was turning around and I hit him in the face. This time, he made a near-fatal mistake. He grabbed the front of my coat near the top button and I heard my coat tear. He could have mopped the aisle on the bus with me if he hadn't torn my coat. I lost all traces of my self control within half of a second. I went absolutely berserk. It was like a dam had burst. The only time Jackie hit me that day was the first two as I was turning around. After he tore my coat, I didn't give him any more opportunities. I don't know how many times I hit him, but I would guess 30 or 40. I don't remember why I stopped hitting him, but I eventually did. I didn't remember until it was over that I had just got my senior ring a few days before. Jackie's face was pretty bloody and his pride was badly bruised.
I'm sure Frank Arthur, the bus driver, saw what happened. After the fight was over, Frank asked Jackie what was wrong. Jackie replied, "Just a little bit of high blood pressure back here." Jackie started running his mouth telling me how he was going to whip my ass good when I got off the bus. I told him he was welcome to try. I was pumped. I told Jackie all he had to do was tell Frank to stop the bus and we'd finish it. Man, I was hot!!! Jackie told Frank to stop the bus so we could get off. Frank stopped the bus at D. B. Abshire's Gulf station in the western end of downtown Jumping Branch. That wasn't a regular stop and we were the only two that got off.
As the school bus pulled out, Jackie said he didn't really want to fight any more. I told him either way was okay with me. If he was going to fight, bring it on. If not, I was going home. He started walking home -- he was probably two miles from his house. I hung around the filling station a few minutes so I wouldn't have to walk with him the 150 yards to the road we lived on.
My dad worked the evening shift and he was almost ready to go to work when I got home. I think my brother and sister had arrived before I did and told Daddy I had been in a fight. When I got home, I described what had happened. He told me that he didn't think fighting was the preferred way to solve problems. I was disappointed because I had just beaten up on a bully that was a lot bigger and meaner than I was. I felt really good about it. I wanted to tell everybody that I had whipped up on a no-good son of a bitch. (Daddy talked to a Mr. Plumley who lived close to Jackie a few months later. Mr. Plumley told Daddy that he was glad to hear that somebody had brought Jackie down a notch or two. Daddy did have a little bit of a grin on his face when he told me about his conversation with Mr. Plumley.)
Anyway, to get to the point of this story, Jackie never did come back to school. I couldn't believe it. I guess I had shamed him in front of everybody on the bus and he couldn't bear to face his buddies again. Several years later, I heard that he had gone into the business of boring holes under roadways for sewer & water lines.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Lies I Wish I Hadn't Told
Jimmy Cragett, my first cousin stayed a week with us on the farm when I was about fourteen years old. We were both smoking cigarettes at that stage in life.
Mommy came upstairs one morning to awaken me so I could go milk old Pet. I had a pack with about five or six cigarettes in it in a back pocket in my blue jeans. After Mommy had gone downstairs, Jimmy and I were getting dressed. We had to be quiet because Daddy was still asleep. Jimmy whispered to me that Mommy had checked the pockets in my pants and that she had found my cigarettes. “Well, I’m smarter than she is.”, I confidently whispered back. I went over to the open window next to the chimney and dropped my cigarettes down to the ground.
While I was getting the milk bucket, some water to wash old Pet’s teats, and a pot to milk into, Mommy said in a low voice, “Give me those cigarettes that are in your back pocket.”
My answer was my best look of surprise and denial. I told her, “I don’t have any cigarettes. Look for yourself.” Mommy didn’t say anything else and I thought the incident was over. Like I said before, I knew I was much smarter than she was. I could tell that Jimmy admired my ability to remain cool. We went out the back door and I picked up my cigarettes as we went around the house. The calf lot where I milked was not visible from our house, so we each smoked a cigarette before going back to the house. I did have enough sense not to take the cigarettes back into the house. I hid them so we could get them later.
Daddy woke up and ate breakfast about two hours later. Jimmy and I went into the living room to watch one of the two television channels we could receive. After Daddy finished breakfast, he came into the living room and told Jimmy that he needed to go outside for a while because he wanted to have a little talk with me. Jimmy left and Daddy held out his hand. “Give me your cigarettes.”
I told him that I didn’t have any. He repeated his request in a calm, assertive voice. I shrugged my shoulders and repeated that I didn’t have any. Daddy was not in the mood to listen to my lies. He stood up and grasped my shirt just below the collar. He picked me up until I would have weighed only about five pounds if I had been standing on a bathroom scale. He put his large right fist against my left cheek and said, “Son, I want you to tell me the truth. Now, where are your cigarettes?”
I suddenly realized that things had just been bumped up a notch and that I was about to receive more than a switching if I remained on my current course. As Hank Williams sang, I saw the light. All I could do was to say, “Okay, okay. I’ll go get them.” And so I did. That’s why I am alive today to be writing about it.
Daddy and I used to go to Pocahontas County several times during the fall of the year. We usually camped by ourselves, but we sometimes stayed with Bill Acord and his son Fred.
During one scouting trip in September, Daddy and Fred Acord walked up a hollow to look for animals and to see how much food the animals had to eat. Fred’s son Larry and I stayed at the car with Bill. Bill rolled his own Prince Albert cigarettes. He offered his tobacco to Larry and me. I didn’t do a very good job of rolling my cigarette, but I smoked it anyhow. I think I was thirteen at the time.
Fast forward about a month. Daddy and I had driven to Pocahontas County. Bill Acord had established a camp and was planning to stay for about six weeks. He had enough room for Daddy and me to sleep in his tent. My cot was close to the tent door. I woke up the next morning as Bill was putting some wood into his stove. I could see and hear Daddy snoring on a cot farther back in the tent. I guess I wanted to impress Bill with my reckless disregard for the fact that Daddy was so close. For some reason, I told Bill that I was going to go outside and “take a smoke”. That’s what I did. I smoked a Winston cigarette.
About twelve or fourteen hours later, Daddy and I were back in the woods coon hunting. We had stopped to listen for the dogs and to rest. From out of the blue, Daddy asked, “What did you tell Bill this morning?”
The blood in my veins suddenly froze. He had not been asleep after all. My brain searched for a believable lie. The only thing I could think of was “I told him I was going to pee.”
Daddy response was a simple “Oh.”
Neither of us spoke for what seemed to be five years. I was lying. He knew I was lying. I knew he knew I was lying. I felt bad about it. I couldn’t think of any way to untell my lie.
For a large part of my childhood, I could not be trusted to tell the truth, especially if I thought the truth would bring punishment. The lies usually were not believed by my parents, so I usually didn’t gain anything by lying.
I wanted a bicycle for Christmas when I was about nine or ten years old. We children went to bed, eager to awaken the next morning and see what Santa had brought us. By that time, I knew who Santa really was. I woke up at about 3:30 am. I decided to quietly see if Santa had brought me a bicycle. I tiptoed out of our bedroom, through the living room, and into the “parlor” where the Christmas tree was. There, in the dim moonlight, I could see the outline of a bicycle. I fondled it for a few minutes and went back to bed.
When the proper time came for us to get up, I tried to act surprised that I had got a bicycle. Later, as we ate breakfast, Daddy asked me if I had got up during the night. I wish I had answered “yes”, but I didn’t. As I was saying the word “no”, I knew Daddy had been awake and had probably watched me fondle the bicycle in the moonlight.
Mommy came upstairs one morning to awaken me so I could go milk old Pet. I had a pack with about five or six cigarettes in it in a back pocket in my blue jeans. After Mommy had gone downstairs, Jimmy and I were getting dressed. We had to be quiet because Daddy was still asleep. Jimmy whispered to me that Mommy had checked the pockets in my pants and that she had found my cigarettes. “Well, I’m smarter than she is.”, I confidently whispered back. I went over to the open window next to the chimney and dropped my cigarettes down to the ground.
While I was getting the milk bucket, some water to wash old Pet’s teats, and a pot to milk into, Mommy said in a low voice, “Give me those cigarettes that are in your back pocket.”
My answer was my best look of surprise and denial. I told her, “I don’t have any cigarettes. Look for yourself.” Mommy didn’t say anything else and I thought the incident was over. Like I said before, I knew I was much smarter than she was. I could tell that Jimmy admired my ability to remain cool. We went out the back door and I picked up my cigarettes as we went around the house. The calf lot where I milked was not visible from our house, so we each smoked a cigarette before going back to the house. I did have enough sense not to take the cigarettes back into the house. I hid them so we could get them later.
Daddy woke up and ate breakfast about two hours later. Jimmy and I went into the living room to watch one of the two television channels we could receive. After Daddy finished breakfast, he came into the living room and told Jimmy that he needed to go outside for a while because he wanted to have a little talk with me. Jimmy left and Daddy held out his hand. “Give me your cigarettes.”
I told him that I didn’t have any. He repeated his request in a calm, assertive voice. I shrugged my shoulders and repeated that I didn’t have any. Daddy was not in the mood to listen to my lies. He stood up and grasped my shirt just below the collar. He picked me up until I would have weighed only about five pounds if I had been standing on a bathroom scale. He put his large right fist against my left cheek and said, “Son, I want you to tell me the truth. Now, where are your cigarettes?”
I suddenly realized that things had just been bumped up a notch and that I was about to receive more than a switching if I remained on my current course. As Hank Williams sang, I saw the light. All I could do was to say, “Okay, okay. I’ll go get them.” And so I did. That’s why I am alive today to be writing about it.
Daddy and I used to go to Pocahontas County several times during the fall of the year. We usually camped by ourselves, but we sometimes stayed with Bill Acord and his son Fred.
During one scouting trip in September, Daddy and Fred Acord walked up a hollow to look for animals and to see how much food the animals had to eat. Fred’s son Larry and I stayed at the car with Bill. Bill rolled his own Prince Albert cigarettes. He offered his tobacco to Larry and me. I didn’t do a very good job of rolling my cigarette, but I smoked it anyhow. I think I was thirteen at the time.
Fast forward about a month. Daddy and I had driven to Pocahontas County. Bill Acord had established a camp and was planning to stay for about six weeks. He had enough room for Daddy and me to sleep in his tent. My cot was close to the tent door. I woke up the next morning as Bill was putting some wood into his stove. I could see and hear Daddy snoring on a cot farther back in the tent. I guess I wanted to impress Bill with my reckless disregard for the fact that Daddy was so close. For some reason, I told Bill that I was going to go outside and “take a smoke”. That’s what I did. I smoked a Winston cigarette.
About twelve or fourteen hours later, Daddy and I were back in the woods coon hunting. We had stopped to listen for the dogs and to rest. From out of the blue, Daddy asked, “What did you tell Bill this morning?”
The blood in my veins suddenly froze. He had not been asleep after all. My brain searched for a believable lie. The only thing I could think of was “I told him I was going to pee.”
Daddy response was a simple “Oh.”
Neither of us spoke for what seemed to be five years. I was lying. He knew I was lying. I knew he knew I was lying. I felt bad about it. I couldn’t think of any way to untell my lie.
For a large part of my childhood, I could not be trusted to tell the truth, especially if I thought the truth would bring punishment. The lies usually were not believed by my parents, so I usually didn’t gain anything by lying.
I wanted a bicycle for Christmas when I was about nine or ten years old. We children went to bed, eager to awaken the next morning and see what Santa had brought us. By that time, I knew who Santa really was. I woke up at about 3:30 am. I decided to quietly see if Santa had brought me a bicycle. I tiptoed out of our bedroom, through the living room, and into the “parlor” where the Christmas tree was. There, in the dim moonlight, I could see the outline of a bicycle. I fondled it for a few minutes and went back to bed.
When the proper time came for us to get up, I tried to act surprised that I had got a bicycle. Later, as we ate breakfast, Daddy asked me if I had got up during the night. I wish I had answered “yes”, but I didn’t. As I was saying the word “no”, I knew Daddy had been awake and had probably watched me fondle the bicycle in the moonlight.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Halloween
I first heard about Halloween when I was five or six years old. We lived at Jenny’s Gap and there were no houses close to our house. One Saturday or Sunday, Daddy was home on Halloween. He got a pumpkin out of our garden about an hour before dark and carved the first jack-o-lantern I ever saw. He asked Mommy to get a candle and a piece of cardboard. Mommy didn’t find any cardboard right away, so she ended up opening a ten-cent cherry pie that Daddy would take to work with him. Daddy put the four-inch square piece of cardboard inside the pumpkin. He took it out to the front porch, and placed a lit candle inside. It was almost completely dark by then, and I liked seeing the candle burning in the smiling face. Daddy told us that some people believed witches flew around on brooms on Halloween.
We moved from Jenny’s Gap to Crab Orchard (Glen View) in October, 1955. I was seven years old. A few days before Halloween, Jimmy Cragett asked me if I wanted to go “Trick or Treating” with the group he planned to go with. I had never heard that phrase, so I asked Jimmy what he meant. He told me that kids put a mask on and go around to houses and people give them candy. I thought he was trying to pull my leg. I had already heard about snipe hunting. However, other people confirmed what Jimmy had told me. I remained skeptical until people started giving us candy.
Myrtle Wills was Daddy’s first cousin Clenda Wills’ daughter. She was a teenager who would take many of the younger children around to about forty houses at Glen View. We all got more candy than I had seen outside a store.
I was a juvenile delinquent the night of Halloween, 1959, when I was eleven. The calendar says Halloween was on Saturday, but I believe the trick or treat activity happened on Friday night. Jimmy Cragett and I bought two masks so we could make our rounds twice and double the amount of candy we could collect. A lot of people knew who we were and would not give us candy when we visited their house the second time.
Twin Oaks Country Club (now Daniel’s winery) was having a dance that night. Their main circuit breaker box was located near the main road and was not visible from the club house. We tripped the main breaker and hid in a field of broomsedge. It wasn’t long before we saw a car coming from the club house. A man got out of the car, looked at the breaker box, and reset the breaker. He got back in his car and drove back to the party. He had not gone out of our sight when we tripped the breaker again. In a few minutes, he was back. He reset the breaker a second time and drove back to the party. We threw the breaker again and hid in the broomsedge again. Nobody came to check the breaker box. In a few minutes, a deputy sheriff drove up and parked. He had a very good flashlight that he used to look for us. We were lying as flat as we could, hoping he would not see us. He left about five minutes later and we decided to have more fun somewhere else.
We each had a bar of soap we had picked up before leaving home. We went to Henigar’s store, the local bread and milk store. We wrote “Leslie Demyan” with soap all over the store windows. Leslie didn’t have a father in the home and his mother worked outside the home. Leslie was a “little rich kid” who seemed to get everything he asked for. Even though he had better toys than we did, we didn’t like him very much.
Jimmy said he happened to be in Henigar’s store when Leslie and his mother came in the next morning (Saturday morning). Mrs. Henigar had called Mrs. Demyan and complained about the soap on her windows. Mrs. Demyan looked at the windows and asked Leslie why he had written his name on the windows. Leslie said he didn’t do it. Leslie’s mother didn’t believe him and told him to clean the windows. I don’t think we ever told him that we had got him into trouble.
One other little prank we pulled that night was to let the air out of two tires on Roy Meador’s car. He hadn’t done anything to us. Jimmy thought of it and I went along with him.
We moved from Jenny’s Gap to Crab Orchard (Glen View) in October, 1955. I was seven years old. A few days before Halloween, Jimmy Cragett asked me if I wanted to go “Trick or Treating” with the group he planned to go with. I had never heard that phrase, so I asked Jimmy what he meant. He told me that kids put a mask on and go around to houses and people give them candy. I thought he was trying to pull my leg. I had already heard about snipe hunting. However, other people confirmed what Jimmy had told me. I remained skeptical until people started giving us candy.
Myrtle Wills was Daddy’s first cousin Clenda Wills’ daughter. She was a teenager who would take many of the younger children around to about forty houses at Glen View. We all got more candy than I had seen outside a store.
I was a juvenile delinquent the night of Halloween, 1959, when I was eleven. The calendar says Halloween was on Saturday, but I believe the trick or treat activity happened on Friday night. Jimmy Cragett and I bought two masks so we could make our rounds twice and double the amount of candy we could collect. A lot of people knew who we were and would not give us candy when we visited their house the second time.
Twin Oaks Country Club (now Daniel’s winery) was having a dance that night. Their main circuit breaker box was located near the main road and was not visible from the club house. We tripped the main breaker and hid in a field of broomsedge. It wasn’t long before we saw a car coming from the club house. A man got out of the car, looked at the breaker box, and reset the breaker. He got back in his car and drove back to the party. He had not gone out of our sight when we tripped the breaker again. In a few minutes, he was back. He reset the breaker a second time and drove back to the party. We threw the breaker again and hid in the broomsedge again. Nobody came to check the breaker box. In a few minutes, a deputy sheriff drove up and parked. He had a very good flashlight that he used to look for us. We were lying as flat as we could, hoping he would not see us. He left about five minutes later and we decided to have more fun somewhere else.
We each had a bar of soap we had picked up before leaving home. We went to Henigar’s store, the local bread and milk store. We wrote “Leslie Demyan” with soap all over the store windows. Leslie didn’t have a father in the home and his mother worked outside the home. Leslie was a “little rich kid” who seemed to get everything he asked for. Even though he had better toys than we did, we didn’t like him very much.
Jimmy said he happened to be in Henigar’s store when Leslie and his mother came in the next morning (Saturday morning). Mrs. Henigar had called Mrs. Demyan and complained about the soap on her windows. Mrs. Demyan looked at the windows and asked Leslie why he had written his name on the windows. Leslie said he didn’t do it. Leslie’s mother didn’t believe him and told him to clean the windows. I don’t think we ever told him that we had got him into trouble.
One other little prank we pulled that night was to let the air out of two tires on Roy Meador’s car. He hadn’t done anything to us. Jimmy thought of it and I went along with him.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Mrs. Polk's Buttermilk
Age 9
We lived at Glen View near Crab Orchard. This day was during the summer, because I was at home and Daddy was still sleeping. Mommy asked me to go to Mrs. Polk’s house and buy a gallon of buttermilk. She gave me fifty cents to pay for it. I could have taken the road up to Mrs. Polk’s house, but I didn’t see any reason to go out of my way. I took the direct route across our back yard and up a pretty steep hill to intersect her driveway near the point that it leveled out at the top of the hill. My path meant I had to walk through some brush and briers that were still wet from a recent morning thundershower. I also had to crawl through a newly constructed barbed wire fence. The fence was so new that there was still some yellow clay dirt around that didn’t get put back into the post holes.
I made the trip to Mrs. Polk’s house without incident and I bought a gallon of buttermilk. It was in a clear glass jug that had originally held vinegar or Coca-Cola syrup. As I made my way back toward home, I didn’t pay attention to where I was walking and I got a big clod of wet yellow clay attached to the sole of my left shoe sole. I think you have probably guessed the rest of the story. Yep. I stepped on a big slick rock that barely stuck out of the ground. The wet clay lubricated my shoe sole and my left foot shot out from under me. I fell on my left thigh. I had the buttermilk in my left hand and it smashed into a thousand pieces when it contacted the rock. At first, I thought I was probably seriously injured. I got up with buttermilk all over my belly, crotch, and left thigh. I didn’t have a scratch on me. I dreaded going home. Mommy must have been feeling pretty good that morning because she didn’t even scold me. She just told me to clean myself up. I can’t remember, but I think Daddy did not get cornbread for lunch that day.
We lived at Glen View near Crab Orchard. This day was during the summer, because I was at home and Daddy was still sleeping. Mommy asked me to go to Mrs. Polk’s house and buy a gallon of buttermilk. She gave me fifty cents to pay for it. I could have taken the road up to Mrs. Polk’s house, but I didn’t see any reason to go out of my way. I took the direct route across our back yard and up a pretty steep hill to intersect her driveway near the point that it leveled out at the top of the hill. My path meant I had to walk through some brush and briers that were still wet from a recent morning thundershower. I also had to crawl through a newly constructed barbed wire fence. The fence was so new that there was still some yellow clay dirt around that didn’t get put back into the post holes.
I made the trip to Mrs. Polk’s house without incident and I bought a gallon of buttermilk. It was in a clear glass jug that had originally held vinegar or Coca-Cola syrup. As I made my way back toward home, I didn’t pay attention to where I was walking and I got a big clod of wet yellow clay attached to the sole of my left shoe sole. I think you have probably guessed the rest of the story. Yep. I stepped on a big slick rock that barely stuck out of the ground. The wet clay lubricated my shoe sole and my left foot shot out from under me. I fell on my left thigh. I had the buttermilk in my left hand and it smashed into a thousand pieces when it contacted the rock. At first, I thought I was probably seriously injured. I got up with buttermilk all over my belly, crotch, and left thigh. I didn’t have a scratch on me. I dreaded going home. Mommy must have been feeling pretty good that morning because she didn’t even scold me. She just told me to clean myself up. I can’t remember, but I think Daddy did not get cornbread for lunch that day.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Water
I don’t remember much about the plumbing in the houses we lived in at in Slab Fork. I’m pretty sure we did have a sink with running water in the house, but I think we did not have a bathroom. I remember a babysitter about 13 years old who lived next door. I believe she was Otto Graham’s daughter. Anyway, she took me with her to their bathroom while she relieved herself. She passed some gas, and I said I was going to tell her mother. The teenager asked me not to tell, so I didn’t.
We moved to Jenny’s Gap when I was about four years old. We carried water from a spring a little way up a hollow from the house. A galvanized pipe about 2 inches in diameter had a small stream of water running out of it. There was a flat rock we sat a 10-quart water bucket on. The bucket would be full of water in about five minutes.
Mommy asked me to take the bucket to the spring late one evening. It was almost dark and I was afraid the “Booger Man” might get me. Mommy persisted, so I decided I had better do it. I slowly walked up the path between two laurel thickets and placed the bucket on the rock. I immediately turned and began running for home. I stepped on my shoestring about half way home and fell against a truck rack Daddy had acquired. The back of my head somehow made contact with a metal bracket at one of the corners. Daddy was working, so I didn’t have any transportation to a doctor’s office. It was too late in the day anyway. Daddy took me to see Dr. Lewis N. Fox, Slab Fork’s company doctor, the next morning. Dr. Fox stitched my head up and it healed in a few weeks.
We moved to Glen View (Crab Orchard) in October, 1955. I was seven years old. We then had a bathroom with a bathtub, a commode, and a sink. I’m not sure, but I think we children got our first toothbrushes after we made this move. We had to take a bath every Friday night whether we needed one or not. I can remember sitting on our couch immediately after a bath, watching Friday night boxing, and waiting for Daddy to get home from work.
We moved to the farm at Jumping Branch about a month before my twelfth birthday. The water supply was a spring down over the hill. There was a well house near the back porch. I’m not sure why we didn’t get water from it. A previous owner had constructed a concrete box around the spring and had piped the spring discharge through a pipe to a livestock watering trough about 50 feet away. We kept boards positioned on top of the concrete to protect it from falling debris. In order to get water from the spring, we would move a few boards out of the way, skim any floating dust or debris off the top of the water, and then fill the bucket(s) we had brought with us. Keeping us supplied with drinking water was not much of a chore, but water to wash clothes was a different story. We caught rain water when we could, but Mommy usually wanted more water from the spring. Sometimes she wanted a lot of water. For a while, each of us had a quota. My quota was usually two or three No. 3 washtubs while Wayne and Joyce each had a smaller tub to fill. I wanted to haul my quota as soon as I could. I used two half-bushel buckets. Joyce and Wayne used standard 10-quart water buckets.
When Mommy’s mule (me) went off to Marshall University, it didn’t take long for Daddy to hire a well driller. Mommy got a sink with hot and cold running water, but no bathroom.
We moved to Jenny’s Gap when I was about four years old. We carried water from a spring a little way up a hollow from the house. A galvanized pipe about 2 inches in diameter had a small stream of water running out of it. There was a flat rock we sat a 10-quart water bucket on. The bucket would be full of water in about five minutes.
Mommy asked me to take the bucket to the spring late one evening. It was almost dark and I was afraid the “Booger Man” might get me. Mommy persisted, so I decided I had better do it. I slowly walked up the path between two laurel thickets and placed the bucket on the rock. I immediately turned and began running for home. I stepped on my shoestring about half way home and fell against a truck rack Daddy had acquired. The back of my head somehow made contact with a metal bracket at one of the corners. Daddy was working, so I didn’t have any transportation to a doctor’s office. It was too late in the day anyway. Daddy took me to see Dr. Lewis N. Fox, Slab Fork’s company doctor, the next morning. Dr. Fox stitched my head up and it healed in a few weeks.
We moved to Glen View (Crab Orchard) in October, 1955. I was seven years old. We then had a bathroom with a bathtub, a commode, and a sink. I’m not sure, but I think we children got our first toothbrushes after we made this move. We had to take a bath every Friday night whether we needed one or not. I can remember sitting on our couch immediately after a bath, watching Friday night boxing, and waiting for Daddy to get home from work.
We moved to the farm at Jumping Branch about a month before my twelfth birthday. The water supply was a spring down over the hill. There was a well house near the back porch. I’m not sure why we didn’t get water from it. A previous owner had constructed a concrete box around the spring and had piped the spring discharge through a pipe to a livestock watering trough about 50 feet away. We kept boards positioned on top of the concrete to protect it from falling debris. In order to get water from the spring, we would move a few boards out of the way, skim any floating dust or debris off the top of the water, and then fill the bucket(s) we had brought with us. Keeping us supplied with drinking water was not much of a chore, but water to wash clothes was a different story. We caught rain water when we could, but Mommy usually wanted more water from the spring. Sometimes she wanted a lot of water. For a while, each of us had a quota. My quota was usually two or three No. 3 washtubs while Wayne and Joyce each had a smaller tub to fill. I wanted to haul my quota as soon as I could. I used two half-bushel buckets. Joyce and Wayne used standard 10-quart water buckets.
When Mommy’s mule (me) went off to Marshall University, it didn’t take long for Daddy to hire a well driller. Mommy got a sink with hot and cold running water, but no bathroom.
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Things I Should Have Been Whipped For
In October, 1955, we moved to a house in Glen View, between Crab Orchard and Glen White. The rent was $35 per month and it included a house, barn, and six acres behind the house. The barn was not visible from the house or main road. When I was ten or eleven years old, I was playing around the old barn with my first cousin Jimmy Cragett. The barn was build next to a hillside and we could easily jump from the hill to the roof. We had played there before, but this day was different. It was also six or eight years before we had seen a Frisbee. We made our own Frisbees with pieces of roofing torn from the barn. We would tear off a piece about a foot in diameter and sail it down over the hill. We completely stripped all the roof off of the barn. That allowed water to drip into the barn and accelerate decay.
I have always liked to sit next to a fire. Since I was five or six years old, I liked to go out in the woods and build a small fire. I was careful to make sure none of the fires got out of control. I also knew enough to burn only dry wood so the fire wouldn’t make much smoke. One summer Saturday, I went into our kitchen to get a glass of water. Mommy glanced at me and asked me what I had in my left front jeans pocket. I was carelessly carrying matches into the house and Mommy picked out the outline of the match box in my pants pocket. I said, “Nothing.” My brain was racing at 90 miles per hour trying to concoct some story that would let me escape the situation without being punished. Mommy was not taken in at all by my lie and she insisted that I empty my pants pocket . Wouldn’t you know it – the last item I pulled out was a box of Copperhead matches which were immediately confiscated. I knew there was going to be a whipping that day and I would be the whippee. Mommy told me that she was not going to whip me. She would wait for Daddy to come home and he would take care of me. I spent the day dreading Daddy’s return.
Daddy got home around 6:00 and he was in a very bad mood. Mommy had fixed supper and she brought it to the dining room table. All five of us sat down and ate supper. My food had no taste because my brain did not have time to listen to my taste buds. My brain was concentrating on the fact that the whipping would soon begin. Daddy finished his supper and left the table. I knew that was Mommy’s cue to tell Daddy that I had been caught with a box of matches in my pants pocket. My sphincter muscles were twitching in the oak chair I was sitting in. To my surprise, Mommy didn’t say a word about matches and me. She quietly started carrying food and dishes into the kitchen. You probably are not surprised that I never asked either parent about this incident. I was thankful Mommy spared me a whipping. She may have thought I had learned my lesson. I did learn my lesson, but not the way she wanted. I learned not to be careless about where I kept my matches. I suspect she knew Daddy was in a foul temper and that he might leave permanent scars on me.
I was walking home one evening after I had delivered my last newspaper. I was walking up the left side of the road up a hill. I was about 300 yards from home on the Crab Orchard side. I was bored and I had been throwing rocks at birds and other targets. I heard a car approaching from behind me. I have no idea why I did it, but I impulsively reached into my pocket, retrieved a marble, and threw it. I hadn’t been able to hit anything else I had thrown at lately. My heart tried to jump out of my body when I saw the marble bounce and hit a blue 1956 Dodge on the right rear fender. The car stopped. The backup lights came on. When he had backed up far enough to talk to me, he asked, “Why did you do that?”
I said, “I don’t know.”
He asked me where I lived and I was smart enough not to give him directions to my house. I told him I lived in a brown house across from Henegar’s Store. I didn’t know who lived there because they were not a paper customer and the house was located across the line into the Glen White School District. The driver told me to get into his car and we would go talk to my Daddy. I declined his invitation. I was not about to get into his car. I made a 90 degree turn and started running down the hill away from the road. I heard the car drive away, but I didn’t go back up to the road in case he turned around and came back. I walked through the woods until I was near the end of our driveway. I went straight into the house and I was a good boy for the remainder of the day. I never did see that car again. I doubt that the marble even left a mark on the car.
I have always liked to sit next to a fire. Since I was five or six years old, I liked to go out in the woods and build a small fire. I was careful to make sure none of the fires got out of control. I also knew enough to burn only dry wood so the fire wouldn’t make much smoke. One summer Saturday, I went into our kitchen to get a glass of water. Mommy glanced at me and asked me what I had in my left front jeans pocket. I was carelessly carrying matches into the house and Mommy picked out the outline of the match box in my pants pocket. I said, “Nothing.” My brain was racing at 90 miles per hour trying to concoct some story that would let me escape the situation without being punished. Mommy was not taken in at all by my lie and she insisted that I empty my pants pocket . Wouldn’t you know it – the last item I pulled out was a box of Copperhead matches which were immediately confiscated. I knew there was going to be a whipping that day and I would be the whippee. Mommy told me that she was not going to whip me. She would wait for Daddy to come home and he would take care of me. I spent the day dreading Daddy’s return.
Daddy got home around 6:00 and he was in a very bad mood. Mommy had fixed supper and she brought it to the dining room table. All five of us sat down and ate supper. My food had no taste because my brain did not have time to listen to my taste buds. My brain was concentrating on the fact that the whipping would soon begin. Daddy finished his supper and left the table. I knew that was Mommy’s cue to tell Daddy that I had been caught with a box of matches in my pants pocket. My sphincter muscles were twitching in the oak chair I was sitting in. To my surprise, Mommy didn’t say a word about matches and me. She quietly started carrying food and dishes into the kitchen. You probably are not surprised that I never asked either parent about this incident. I was thankful Mommy spared me a whipping. She may have thought I had learned my lesson. I did learn my lesson, but not the way she wanted. I learned not to be careless about where I kept my matches. I suspect she knew Daddy was in a foul temper and that he might leave permanent scars on me.
I was walking home one evening after I had delivered my last newspaper. I was walking up the left side of the road up a hill. I was about 300 yards from home on the Crab Orchard side. I was bored and I had been throwing rocks at birds and other targets. I heard a car approaching from behind me. I have no idea why I did it, but I impulsively reached into my pocket, retrieved a marble, and threw it. I hadn’t been able to hit anything else I had thrown at lately. My heart tried to jump out of my body when I saw the marble bounce and hit a blue 1956 Dodge on the right rear fender. The car stopped. The backup lights came on. When he had backed up far enough to talk to me, he asked, “Why did you do that?”
I said, “I don’t know.”
He asked me where I lived and I was smart enough not to give him directions to my house. I told him I lived in a brown house across from Henegar’s Store. I didn’t know who lived there because they were not a paper customer and the house was located across the line into the Glen White School District. The driver told me to get into his car and we would go talk to my Daddy. I declined his invitation. I was not about to get into his car. I made a 90 degree turn and started running down the hill away from the road. I heard the car drive away, but I didn’t go back up to the road in case he turned around and came back. I walked through the woods until I was near the end of our driveway. I went straight into the house and I was a good boy for the remainder of the day. I never did see that car again. I doubt that the marble even left a mark on the car.
Paper Route
I had a paper route for the last two years we lived at Glen View. I was almost ten years old when I took over an existing Raleigh Register route. It was an evening paper five days per week and a morning paper on weekends. I had about forty customers and the starting profit was about $13.00 per month.
Having the paper route meant I had to arise very early on weekends to deliver my papers. Joyce took over part of my route that was near the house we lived in.
I remember one very cold, snowy day that Daddy didn’t go to work. He did drive me around my route so I didn’t have to be out in the blizzard conditions very long without getting warm.
On another occasion, I stayed home from school because I was sick. Mommy said she would walk my route with me because I was sick. I put my coat on and waited in the kitchen for Mommy to get her coat. I suddenly began throwing up. I figured it would be better to throw up in the kitchen sink than in the floor, so I put my head over the sink just in time. I vomited about half of it through my nose. I think some people might call it projectile vomiting.
Virgil Gunther built what we called “the three little houses”. Renters in these houses usually didn’t stay very long before moving on. Anyway, one of my customers was a doughnut delivery man. He didn’t have any room in his house to store the doughnuts, so he made the mistake of storing them on the porch where I left his newspaper. There were several times when I felt confident nobody in the house was awake as I delivered the newspaper early on Saturday or Sunday morning. On those occasions, I would carefully remove one box (one dozen) doughnuts from the large cardboard boxes on his porch. I would eat three or four that day and hide the remainder. The doughnuts were very good. I never was challenged and asked if I had stolen any doughnuts. I do not remember telling anybody about this until now as I write this.
My paper route included the Twin Oaks Country Club, a nine-hole golf course. The property is now Richard Daniel’s winery. About half of the time, I would see pop bottles lying in the grass near the first tee. Golfers would buy a bottle at the clubhouse and finish it as they began playing. I saw the bottles as a business opportunity. I also knew I was stealing them. They were worth two cents each. When I had accumulated six bottles, I could buy a bottle of pop at Henegar’s Store. The pop cost a dime with a two-cent deposit on the bottle if I took it out of the store. Everything was going along pretty well until early one Sunday morning. I was collecting a few bottles at the first tee when I heard a voice say, “Hey!!! Putthose bottles down! I wondered where my pop bottles were going.” The voice was that of a man who worked at the golf course. His first name was Miles. I didn’t know he was sleeping in a building near the tee that we called the pro shop. That was the end of my pop bottle business.
Jack Ball was the manager of the golf course. He also trained boxers. There was a boxing bag hanging in the garage next to the clubhouse. There were several occasions when there would be a small crowd on the patio. The crowd included people who worked there and boys who were caddies. Jack would offer Jimmy Cragget and me twenty-five cents each to put the gloves on and box for three rounds. I would go through quite a bit of inconvenience for a quarter, so I never refused. Jack took advantage of Jimmy and me by letting us fight for about fifteen minutes before calling an end to each round. I would get so tired that I couldn’t hold my hands up in front of me. I would sometimes drop my hands and back away from Jimmy. When he came swinging at me, I would wait until the last second to put my right hand up and let him run into my stationary glove. Everybody who watched the boxing match appeared to be entertained by it. And I could buy three ice cream bars for seven cents each and four pieces of penny candy that Mommy would not know about. If she had known about it, I would have, at a minimum, been rebuked.
One of my customers was a widow, Mrs. Barrett. Her husband had been a bigwig at a coal company, and she appeared to have more money than most of my customers. She also had a dog that owned her yard. The dog would bark and growl like it wanted to chew me to pieces every time it saw me. The dog didn’t have a special dislike for me. It barked at everybody but Mrs. Barrett. I didn’t have to worry about the dog most of the time because I would leave her paper stuck in the fence at her front gate. However, when collection day came, I had to open the gate, climb about seven or eight steps, and walk about fifteen feet on her front porch. If the dog was unaware that I was on the porch, it knew it as soon as I knocked on the door. If the dog was in the back yard, I would knock on her door and run back to the gate. The newspaper subscription price was 88 cents per month. Mrs. Barrett always gave me a dollar and told me to keep the change. She would also give me a Christmas gift. She was a very nice person, but her dog was not nice.
Having the paper route meant I had to arise very early on weekends to deliver my papers. Joyce took over part of my route that was near the house we lived in.
I remember one very cold, snowy day that Daddy didn’t go to work. He did drive me around my route so I didn’t have to be out in the blizzard conditions very long without getting warm.
On another occasion, I stayed home from school because I was sick. Mommy said she would walk my route with me because I was sick. I put my coat on and waited in the kitchen for Mommy to get her coat. I suddenly began throwing up. I figured it would be better to throw up in the kitchen sink than in the floor, so I put my head over the sink just in time. I vomited about half of it through my nose. I think some people might call it projectile vomiting.
Virgil Gunther built what we called “the three little houses”. Renters in these houses usually didn’t stay very long before moving on. Anyway, one of my customers was a doughnut delivery man. He didn’t have any room in his house to store the doughnuts, so he made the mistake of storing them on the porch where I left his newspaper. There were several times when I felt confident nobody in the house was awake as I delivered the newspaper early on Saturday or Sunday morning. On those occasions, I would carefully remove one box (one dozen) doughnuts from the large cardboard boxes on his porch. I would eat three or four that day and hide the remainder. The doughnuts were very good. I never was challenged and asked if I had stolen any doughnuts. I do not remember telling anybody about this until now as I write this.
My paper route included the Twin Oaks Country Club, a nine-hole golf course. The property is now Richard Daniel’s winery. About half of the time, I would see pop bottles lying in the grass near the first tee. Golfers would buy a bottle at the clubhouse and finish it as they began playing. I saw the bottles as a business opportunity. I also knew I was stealing them. They were worth two cents each. When I had accumulated six bottles, I could buy a bottle of pop at Henegar’s Store. The pop cost a dime with a two-cent deposit on the bottle if I took it out of the store. Everything was going along pretty well until early one Sunday morning. I was collecting a few bottles at the first tee when I heard a voice say, “Hey!!! Putthose bottles down! I wondered where my pop bottles were going.” The voice was that of a man who worked at the golf course. His first name was Miles. I didn’t know he was sleeping in a building near the tee that we called the pro shop. That was the end of my pop bottle business.
Jack Ball was the manager of the golf course. He also trained boxers. There was a boxing bag hanging in the garage next to the clubhouse. There were several occasions when there would be a small crowd on the patio. The crowd included people who worked there and boys who were caddies. Jack would offer Jimmy Cragget and me twenty-five cents each to put the gloves on and box for three rounds. I would go through quite a bit of inconvenience for a quarter, so I never refused. Jack took advantage of Jimmy and me by letting us fight for about fifteen minutes before calling an end to each round. I would get so tired that I couldn’t hold my hands up in front of me. I would sometimes drop my hands and back away from Jimmy. When he came swinging at me, I would wait until the last second to put my right hand up and let him run into my stationary glove. Everybody who watched the boxing match appeared to be entertained by it. And I could buy three ice cream bars for seven cents each and four pieces of penny candy that Mommy would not know about. If she had known about it, I would have, at a minimum, been rebuked.
One of my customers was a widow, Mrs. Barrett. Her husband had been a bigwig at a coal company, and she appeared to have more money than most of my customers. She also had a dog that owned her yard. The dog would bark and growl like it wanted to chew me to pieces every time it saw me. The dog didn’t have a special dislike for me. It barked at everybody but Mrs. Barrett. I didn’t have to worry about the dog most of the time because I would leave her paper stuck in the fence at her front gate. However, when collection day came, I had to open the gate, climb about seven or eight steps, and walk about fifteen feet on her front porch. If the dog was unaware that I was on the porch, it knew it as soon as I knocked on the door. If the dog was in the back yard, I would knock on her door and run back to the gate. The newspaper subscription price was 88 cents per month. Mrs. Barrett always gave me a dollar and told me to keep the change. She would also give me a Christmas gift. She was a very nice person, but her dog was not nice.
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Skinny Dipping
The Roy Keaton family normally went to visit Grandma and Grandpa Keaton every Sunday. Edna and Ethel usually brought their brood to Grandpa’s too. At the time I was six, there was a big herd of children between the ages of three and twelve – three from Roy, four from Edna, and three from Ethel. If it happened to be a Sunday fairly soon after Christmas, somebody might have a toy to play with. Otherwise there were ten kids and no toys.
We liked playing in the creek in Old Slab, but our parents did not share our enthusiasm for that activity. There were a few times I can remember a group of us skinny dipping at a swimming hole just upstream from the old Birchfield School. If we left our clothes on and played in the creek, it was hard to be believed if we later lied and said that we had not been playing in the creek.
The water in Old Slab was clear and unpolluted. However, the water in Slab Fork Creek near Grandma Cook’s house at Hotchkiss was polluted. Slab Fork Coal Company’s coal preparation plant discharged waste coal and coal refuse into the Creek five days per week. Telling a lie saying I had not been playing in Slab Fork Creek usually didn’t work. Mommy would simply ask me to explain why my normally white socks were black.
We liked playing in the creek in Old Slab, but our parents did not share our enthusiasm for that activity. There were a few times I can remember a group of us skinny dipping at a swimming hole just upstream from the old Birchfield School. If we left our clothes on and played in the creek, it was hard to be believed if we later lied and said that we had not been playing in the creek.
The water in Old Slab was clear and unpolluted. However, the water in Slab Fork Creek near Grandma Cook’s house at Hotchkiss was polluted. Slab Fork Coal Company’s coal preparation plant discharged waste coal and coal refuse into the Creek five days per week. Telling a lie saying I had not been playing in Slab Fork Creek usually didn’t work. Mommy would simply ask me to explain why my normally white socks were black.
Daddy - Roy R. Keaton
Daddy said he was born April 26, 1927, about a mile up Old Slab, a tributary of Slab Fork Creek, near the Wyoming-Raleigh County border in West Virginia. My Grandpa Keaton was Herbert Keaton and my Grandma Keaton was Lula McKinney Keaton. They lived in a small cabin until Daddy was about six years old. Several neighbors helped Herbert build a larger log cabin. I think it was first built as two rooms with a connecting enclosed space. By the time I came along, a kitchen, a dining room, and a bedroom had been added. I believe electric power was extended to Grandpa’s house after WW II. Grandpa’s house burned in the mid- 1950s while no one was home. My grandparents lost all they had but the clothes they had on and the truck Grandpa was driving.
Daddy said he was born in a small log cabin. When he was about six, his dad and some other men built a larger log cabin, and the family moved into it. He and his family attended Birchfield Grade School, which is located about half a mile up Old Slab. Some of the school’s standard lunches were buttermilk and bread, beans and cornbread, and the whole family ate out of a communal bucket.
While Daddy was hunting, he fell and broke the front site on the rifle he had, which was his brother Henry’s .22 rifle. He didn’t want anyone to find out so he quietly took the rifle back into the house and ordered a new site for it from Sears and Roebuck for under a dollar. When it came, he took a hammer and a nail and drove the front site sideways out of its dovetail mount. He then inserted the new site into the old mount and tapped it until it appeared to be centered. He shot it two or three times to check for accuracy and it was as good as it ever had been. He was relieved to be able to do that without being found out.
When Daddy was about twelve-years-old, Grandma’s brother, Okla was visiting the family. Grandma had a miscarriage while Grandpa was at work. Uncle Okla handed Daddy the keys to his car and told him to drive while Uncle Okla was in the back seat trying to care for Grandma. Daddy liked to drive, but protested that he didn’t have a driver’s license. Daddy drove to Slab Fork and waited for an ambulance from Beckley. That was the closest an ambulance could get to their house, which was about four miles from Slab Fork. Grandma recovered.
Daddy’s brother, Henry, was killed in August after the D-Day invasion of France. Daddy’s Daddy’s sister Edna’s husband was killed about the same time as Henry. Daddy’s oldest brother, Basil, was killed in February, 1945. As soon as Daddy turned seventeen, he quit school in the 11th grade and enlisted in the US Navy. He told me he felt like it was his duty to represent his family in the war.
He went to Great Lakes Naval Station for boot camp. He finished shortly after Japan surrendered and the war ended. He was assigned to the USS Pine Island, which was a Sea-Plane tender. He went to Saipan, Shanghai, China and Tokyo, Japan. Daddy accumulated quite a few souvenirs. One day at his barracks, they all had to stand inspection. There was an outbreak of uveitis, inflammation of the middle layer of the eye. He was rushed to an airplane and flown to the island of Guam.
He stayed in a hospital on Guam for a few days and boarded a hospital ship bound for San Francisco. As he was leaving the ship, he took his baggage claim ticket to the baggage department. The man working there brought one bag to the counter. Daddy asked where his other bag was. The man said he should have one ticket for each bag he brought onto the ship. Daddy realized he was the victim of a robbery, but there was nothing he could do about it. The bag he received contained his clothing. The bag he did not get held his souvenirs.
One day, Daddy was lighting firecrackers and throwing them onto a passing coal train from the top of a rock at Wise Bailey’s Cliff. The cliffs were named because Wise Bailey (my Aunt Cora Cook’s husband) was reputed to have made moonshine there. Daddy had one firecracker left and as he lit it, he saw the caboose coming. He wanted to scare the men in the caboose, so he held the firecracker a little bit too long. Just as he was preparing to throw it, the firecracker went off in his hand. Daddy told me that it really, really hurt.
When he was about six, Daddy and his mother were returning home one evening. Daddy was ahead of Grandma on the road when he was shot with a shotgun. A man was hunting in the woods above the road and Daddy had apparently flushed a grouse, which the hunter shot. By coincidence, Daddy was on the other side of the grouse. He was shot with two pellets, one in his forehead and the other in his upper arm. Grandma was hysterical. Grandpa loaded him on a horse and took him to a doctor. As he passed his Uncle Virgil’s house, everybody came out to see what was going on. Daddy said he just smiled real big and said, almost proudly, “I got shot.” The doctor removed the shotgun pellet from his forehead but left the one in his arm, saying it would never cause him any problem.
My great grandfather Henry J. Keaton played the fiddle. My grandfather Herbert Keaton played the banjo. Everybody in Herbert’s family played at least one stringed instrument, except Grandma and Daddy’s oldest brother, Basil. Henry was the leader of the family’s musicians.
Daddy said he was born in a small log cabin. When he was about six, his dad and some other men built a larger log cabin, and the family moved into it. He and his family attended Birchfield Grade School, which is located about half a mile up Old Slab. Some of the school’s standard lunches were buttermilk and bread, beans and cornbread, and the whole family ate out of a communal bucket.
While Daddy was hunting, he fell and broke the front site on the rifle he had, which was his brother Henry’s .22 rifle. He didn’t want anyone to find out so he quietly took the rifle back into the house and ordered a new site for it from Sears and Roebuck for under a dollar. When it came, he took a hammer and a nail and drove the front site sideways out of its dovetail mount. He then inserted the new site into the old mount and tapped it until it appeared to be centered. He shot it two or three times to check for accuracy and it was as good as it ever had been. He was relieved to be able to do that without being found out.
When Daddy was about twelve-years-old, Grandma’s brother, Okla was visiting the family. Grandma had a miscarriage while Grandpa was at work. Uncle Okla handed Daddy the keys to his car and told him to drive while Uncle Okla was in the back seat trying to care for Grandma. Daddy liked to drive, but protested that he didn’t have a driver’s license. Daddy drove to Slab Fork and waited for an ambulance from Beckley. That was the closest an ambulance could get to their house, which was about four miles from Slab Fork. Grandma recovered.
Daddy’s brother, Henry, was killed in August after the D-Day invasion of France. Daddy’s Daddy’s sister Edna’s husband was killed about the same time as Henry. Daddy’s oldest brother, Basil, was killed in February, 1945. As soon as Daddy turned seventeen, he quit school in the 11th grade and enlisted in the US Navy. He told me he felt like it was his duty to represent his family in the war.
He went to Great Lakes Naval Station for boot camp. He finished shortly after Japan surrendered and the war ended. He was assigned to the USS Pine Island, which was a Sea-Plane tender. He went to Saipan, Shanghai, China and Tokyo, Japan. Daddy accumulated quite a few souvenirs. One day at his barracks, they all had to stand inspection. There was an outbreak of uveitis, inflammation of the middle layer of the eye. He was rushed to an airplane and flown to the island of Guam.
He stayed in a hospital on Guam for a few days and boarded a hospital ship bound for San Francisco. As he was leaving the ship, he took his baggage claim ticket to the baggage department. The man working there brought one bag to the counter. Daddy asked where his other bag was. The man said he should have one ticket for each bag he brought onto the ship. Daddy realized he was the victim of a robbery, but there was nothing he could do about it. The bag he received contained his clothing. The bag he did not get held his souvenirs.
One day, Daddy was lighting firecrackers and throwing them onto a passing coal train from the top of a rock at Wise Bailey’s Cliff. The cliffs were named because Wise Bailey (my Aunt Cora Cook’s husband) was reputed to have made moonshine there. Daddy had one firecracker left and as he lit it, he saw the caboose coming. He wanted to scare the men in the caboose, so he held the firecracker a little bit too long. Just as he was preparing to throw it, the firecracker went off in his hand. Daddy told me that it really, really hurt.
When he was about six, Daddy and his mother were returning home one evening. Daddy was ahead of Grandma on the road when he was shot with a shotgun. A man was hunting in the woods above the road and Daddy had apparently flushed a grouse, which the hunter shot. By coincidence, Daddy was on the other side of the grouse. He was shot with two pellets, one in his forehead and the other in his upper arm. Grandma was hysterical. Grandpa loaded him on a horse and took him to a doctor. As he passed his Uncle Virgil’s house, everybody came out to see what was going on. Daddy said he just smiled real big and said, almost proudly, “I got shot.” The doctor removed the shotgun pellet from his forehead but left the one in his arm, saying it would never cause him any problem.
My great grandfather Henry J. Keaton played the fiddle. My grandfather Herbert Keaton played the banjo. Everybody in Herbert’s family played at least one stringed instrument, except Grandma and Daddy’s oldest brother, Basil. Henry was the leader of the family’s musicians.
Friday, October 7, 2011
Disclaimer
To those who have somehow become aware that I wrote a few lines about my life on this earth:
I have tried to write about things the way I remember them. I understand that the human brain tends to repress unhappy memories and embellish happy ones. If you were a witness to any of the events I describe, but have a different recollection, try not to be too critical.
I will admit to a very small amount of criminal activity, but I don’t remember causing any lasting harm. I don’t remember committing any felonies; only misdemeanors. I think the statute of limitations ran out a long time ago.
I have tried to write about things the way I remember them. I understand that the human brain tends to repress unhappy memories and embellish happy ones. If you were a witness to any of the events I describe, but have a different recollection, try not to be too critical.
I will admit to a very small amount of criminal activity, but I don’t remember causing any lasting harm. I don’t remember committing any felonies; only misdemeanors. I think the statute of limitations ran out a long time ago.
Black Man ‘Possum Hunter Rescue
While living at Jenny’s Gap, I slept through an event that was unusual. Mommy had put all of us children to bed for the night. Daddy worked the evening shift and usually got home from work around midnight. Mommy didn’t go to bed because she was going to stay awake until Daddy came home.
Somehow, Mommy heard someone crying out for help in the woods behind our house. I suspect she had stepped outside to relieve herself and heard the cry. Mommy got a flashlight and investigated. She found a black man who had been ‘possum hunting and somehow shot himself in the leg with his pistol. Mommy helped him walk to our house and arrived just as Daddy got home. Daddy took the man to a hospital emergency room.
I didn’t find out about this until the next morning. I slept through all of the excitement.
Somehow, Mommy heard someone crying out for help in the woods behind our house. I suspect she had stepped outside to relieve herself and heard the cry. Mommy got a flashlight and investigated. She found a black man who had been ‘possum hunting and somehow shot himself in the leg with his pistol. Mommy helped him walk to our house and arrived just as Daddy got home. Daddy took the man to a hospital emergency room.
I didn’t find out about this until the next morning. I slept through all of the excitement.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Biography - Part Five - Crab Orchard
The house we moved into at Glen View (a suburb of Crab Orchard) was much better than our old house at Jenny’s Gap. The rent was $35.00 pre month. It had twice as many rooms – six! Hot and cold running water. And a bathroom! A gas heater in the living room provided heat. We no longer had to carry coal and tend the fire. Jim and Eunice Cragett lived about a quarter of a mile up the road from us. Mary Cragett was in the fourth grade like I was. Mary told me the time the school bus ran and told me to stand by the road. I thought I had hit the big time. I was able to ride to school.
When we got to the Old Crab Orchard School, Mary introduced me to Haven Clay, the principal. I gave him my grade card from Acord Mountain School and told him I was in the fourth grade. He asked me how old I was and I told him I was seven years old. He didn’t believe me. He gave me a form to fill out – name, address, parents, etc. One of the lines asked for my telephone number. I wrote the phone number that was on the telephone in our living room. The previous renter had a telephone, but it had been disconnected before we moved in. Well, Mr. Clay called that number and reached a restaurant that had recently been assigned that number. Mr. Clay didn’t know what to do. He gave me a test. I don’t know if it was an IQ test or some other standardized test. After I finished the test, he graded it and said I could be in the fourth grade.
There were two fourth grade classes. Mrs. Lilly taught one and the other one had two teachers. That’s the room I got. Mrs. Sadie Wender, the jeweler’s wife, taught half a day and Mr. Clay taught half a day. When the bell rang at the end of the day, I didn’t realize that we had to hurry to get everything put up, get our coat, and get in line for the school bus. Mary Cragett kept telling me to hurry, but I didn’t. By the time we left the classroom, the other children had marched down off the hill, boarded the bus, and started home. We did get to see the black smoke boiling up around the back of the bus as it went out of sight. We walked home that day. It was only about a mile, but Mary didn’t like it.
The next day, I understood what had to be done at the end of the day. As soon as the bell rang, I grabbed my coat and got in line with the other students from my room. Mrs. Lilly, the other fourth grade teacher, patrolled up and down the lines trying to maintain order. I’ll be kind to her and say she was an extremely grouchy woman. As she came by me, she grabbed my arm and slapped me hard in the face. “Get in the second grade line where you belong!” That would never do these days, but that was then and not now. I meekly walked to the line of second graders and marched down the hill with them. Mrs. Lilly hunted me up the next morning and apologized to me. I suppose somebody told her that I was a fourth-grader. I wish she had let me slap her, but that option wasn’t offered to me.
The playground had swings, “monkey bars”, and a merry-go-round. Jimmy Cragett became my pal on the playground. He was only two months younger than I was. Jimmy was a better marble shooter than I was. I ate lunch in the cafeteria. Some of the food was good and some wasn’t. For twenty cents a day, it was a pretty good deal. Extra milk cost three cents.
The spelling bee was a big event. The newspaper printed lists of words that participants would be asked to spell. I think there were three groups – fourth grade, fifth and sixth grades, and seventh and eighth grades. Daddy told me that he would buy me five hundred marbles if I went to the regional finals. Diane Stover was the winner and I was runner up. I spelled “chief” wrong. I forgot “i before e except after c”. Daddy missed a day of work to see me spell at the next level. The spelling bee for the Beckley area was held in the evening at Woodrow Wilson High School. That building would later become Park Junior High School. There were thirty-five contestants. I was the seventeenth one to be disqualified. I knew how to spell “quarrel”, but it came out with an extra “e”.
Marbles were sold in packages of twenty-five. Daddy bought me twenty packages one Saturday. I counted them as I opened the packages and found that I had 512 marbles. I loaded my pockets with marbles the next Monday morning hoping to win more marbles at school and increase my new-found wealth. I was not a good marbles player. I lost a lot of marbles. Jimmy Cragett came to our house one Saturday and we played marbles in our driveway. He left with 125 of my marbles. Within a few days, I had no marbles.
When we got to the Old Crab Orchard School, Mary introduced me to Haven Clay, the principal. I gave him my grade card from Acord Mountain School and told him I was in the fourth grade. He asked me how old I was and I told him I was seven years old. He didn’t believe me. He gave me a form to fill out – name, address, parents, etc. One of the lines asked for my telephone number. I wrote the phone number that was on the telephone in our living room. The previous renter had a telephone, but it had been disconnected before we moved in. Well, Mr. Clay called that number and reached a restaurant that had recently been assigned that number. Mr. Clay didn’t know what to do. He gave me a test. I don’t know if it was an IQ test or some other standardized test. After I finished the test, he graded it and said I could be in the fourth grade.
There were two fourth grade classes. Mrs. Lilly taught one and the other one had two teachers. That’s the room I got. Mrs. Sadie Wender, the jeweler’s wife, taught half a day and Mr. Clay taught half a day. When the bell rang at the end of the day, I didn’t realize that we had to hurry to get everything put up, get our coat, and get in line for the school bus. Mary Cragett kept telling me to hurry, but I didn’t. By the time we left the classroom, the other children had marched down off the hill, boarded the bus, and started home. We did get to see the black smoke boiling up around the back of the bus as it went out of sight. We walked home that day. It was only about a mile, but Mary didn’t like it.
The next day, I understood what had to be done at the end of the day. As soon as the bell rang, I grabbed my coat and got in line with the other students from my room. Mrs. Lilly, the other fourth grade teacher, patrolled up and down the lines trying to maintain order. I’ll be kind to her and say she was an extremely grouchy woman. As she came by me, she grabbed my arm and slapped me hard in the face. “Get in the second grade line where you belong!” That would never do these days, but that was then and not now. I meekly walked to the line of second graders and marched down the hill with them. Mrs. Lilly hunted me up the next morning and apologized to me. I suppose somebody told her that I was a fourth-grader. I wish she had let me slap her, but that option wasn’t offered to me.
The playground had swings, “monkey bars”, and a merry-go-round. Jimmy Cragett became my pal on the playground. He was only two months younger than I was. Jimmy was a better marble shooter than I was. I ate lunch in the cafeteria. Some of the food was good and some wasn’t. For twenty cents a day, it was a pretty good deal. Extra milk cost three cents.
The spelling bee was a big event. The newspaper printed lists of words that participants would be asked to spell. I think there were three groups – fourth grade, fifth and sixth grades, and seventh and eighth grades. Daddy told me that he would buy me five hundred marbles if I went to the regional finals. Diane Stover was the winner and I was runner up. I spelled “chief” wrong. I forgot “i before e except after c”. Daddy missed a day of work to see me spell at the next level. The spelling bee for the Beckley area was held in the evening at Woodrow Wilson High School. That building would later become Park Junior High School. There were thirty-five contestants. I was the seventeenth one to be disqualified. I knew how to spell “quarrel”, but it came out with an extra “e”.
Marbles were sold in packages of twenty-five. Daddy bought me twenty packages one Saturday. I counted them as I opened the packages and found that I had 512 marbles. I loaded my pockets with marbles the next Monday morning hoping to win more marbles at school and increase my new-found wealth. I was not a good marbles player. I lost a lot of marbles. Jimmy Cragett came to our house one Saturday and we played marbles in our driveway. He left with 125 of my marbles. Within a few days, I had no marbles.
Biography - Part Four - Acord Mountain School
There were fewer than a dozen families who lived on Acord Mountain. Some of the names I remember are Paul Acord, Dewey Acord, Burl Acord, Dorse Cozart, and the Cochrans. Several families who did not live on the mountain sent their children to school there. I can remember Lacy Gray, Fred Acord, Russell Canada and Joy Canada had children that went there. The road up the mountain was so bad that most people walked up. Trying to drive a car up the mountain was unthinkable. The only vehicles I remember seeing on the mountain were 4-wheel drive jeeps. Acord Mountain School was a two-room school on top of the mountain. Maud Daniel taught first through fourth grades and Mr. Wade, the principal, taught fifth through eighth grades.
Daddy played the banjo at a pie supper one Saturday night in November of 1953. I was five years old. Pie suppers were a way for schools to raise money. Women and girls would prepare food and bring it to the school. There was square dancing and people visited with each other. The highlight of the evening was the auction. One at a time, the food prepared by each woman was sold. The man who was the successful bidder was privileged to eat the food he bought with the woman who had prepared it. The prettier single women/girls were usually more expensive to dine with. [It’s still that way!!] Daddy talked to Maud Daniel and told her that I was looking forward to starting in the first grade the next September. Kindergarten hadn’t been invented in this area yet, and the normal age for beginning school was six. Miss Daniel told Daddy that they weren’t very formal there and I could come and sit in if I wanted to. She said I wouldn’t be a proper student until the next year, but I could sit in and observe the classes. Daddy told me about what Miss Daniel said the next day. He asked if I would like to go. I enthusiastically told him yes.
Mommy told me what to expect at school and gave me some instructions about how I should behave. She asked me what I would do if I needed to pee. I said I would go outside and pee. “No, raise your hand and when the teacher asks what you want, say, ‘May I be excused?’” Excused for what? Why couldn’t I say what I meant? That didn’t seem logical to me, but I accepted it.
Mommy got me out of bed Monday morning and fixed breakfast for me. She fixed me a lunch while I ate. I walked alone to the road and turned left to the house where the Gray family lived. Three or four Gray children attended Acord Mountain School. I walked to school with them. I remember wondering if we would ever get there. It seemed like a long way up to the school. When we got to the school, I went in and looked around. There were about twenty desks in the room. Each one had a folding seat with a desk behind it. Students sat on one piece of furniture and used the desk attached to the seat in front of him. Each desk had a hole in it for a bottle of ink. We didn’t use ink. I saw my first cloakroom. One of the Grays told me to take my coat off and hang it up there. There was a coal stove and a contraption I had never seen before. When I asked about it, I was told that it was a water pump. One of the kids showed me how to fold a piece of paper into a drinking cup. When the handle was pumped, water appeared. A blackboard covered the entire width of the wall behind the teacher’s desk. It was really black, not green like most are today. The chalk we used was yellow. Large cursive letters of the alphabet printed on green cardboard hung in a line above the blackboard.
The teacher gave the second, third, and fourth graders some brief instructions to get them started. She then brought the first graders to the blackboard and started teaching them to draw circles and straight lines. They hadn’t started forming letters yet. I thought they must not be very smart. I sat quietly and watched. Halfway through the morning, the teacher announced that it was time for recess. Mommy had not said anything about recess. I didn’t know what to expect. All of the children went outside to play. Miss Daniel got half a sandwich out of her lunch and took it outside to eat. It looked so good. It had been made with meat that was not bologna, mayonnaise, and a big slice of tomato. Miss Daniel saw me eyeballing her sandwich and told me that I could eat part of my lunch during recess if I wanted to.
After I had been going to school for a few days, a few of the older girls took me into the other room after we had eaten lunch. They asked me to read to them out of their schoolbooks. I did. One girl got a dictionary and asked me to pronounce some pretty big words. After pronouncing one long word, I heard one of them say that she didn’t even know how to say that word.
Miss Daniel gave me a report card every six weeks just like she did for the other children. She promoted me to the second grade at the end of the year. Lotus Blankenship was the teacher when school resumed the next fall. Charlie Gray had missed most of the first grade because of sickness, and was a grade behind the other children his age. He was a fellow second grader. We would finish our assignments long before the other second graders. Remember that the teacher had four grades to keep occupied. Charlie and I would talk, laugh, and throw paper while Mrs. Blankenship was teaching to the other three grades. Mrs. Blankenship administered the only corporal punishment I ever received in school. On two occasions, she grabbed the fingers of my right hand, bent them back, and struck the palm of my hand sharply with a ruler. That got my attention. That kind of punishment is not politically correct today. About six weeks into the school year, Mrs. Blankenship asked Charlie and me if we would like to move to the third grade. We both said yes. She gave each of us a note to take home for our parents to sign. Charlie and I were in the third grade the next day. I was asked to take my turn reading aloud a few days later. I came to a word that I hadn’t seen before, but I didn’t even slow down. I pronounced it the way it would be if the English language had consistent rules of pronunciation. I was embarrassed when the teacher corrected me. The word was “island”.
When I started the fourth grade in September 1955, there was yet another teacher. She was Maud Daniel’s sister, Joanne Sweeney. Mr. Wade came into our room after lunch on the first day of the fourth grade. He told all of the boys to follow him. We went to the boys’ toilet. He said he wanted every one of us to go in and take a look. When my turn came, I walked in and saw that somebody had unrolled about ten rolls of toilet paper. Toilet paper was everywhere. After each of us had his turn, Mr. Wade said, “I want to know which one of you did that.”
A first grade boy said, “I did, Mister.”
“Why?”
“What is that stuff, anyway?” was the boy’s reply. He had never seen toilet paper. He didn’t get a whipping, but he didn’t do that again. My education at Acord Mountain School ended when we moved to Glen View in October of that year.
Daddy played the banjo at a pie supper one Saturday night in November of 1953. I was five years old. Pie suppers were a way for schools to raise money. Women and girls would prepare food and bring it to the school. There was square dancing and people visited with each other. The highlight of the evening was the auction. One at a time, the food prepared by each woman was sold. The man who was the successful bidder was privileged to eat the food he bought with the woman who had prepared it. The prettier single women/girls were usually more expensive to dine with. [It’s still that way!!] Daddy talked to Maud Daniel and told her that I was looking forward to starting in the first grade the next September. Kindergarten hadn’t been invented in this area yet, and the normal age for beginning school was six. Miss Daniel told Daddy that they weren’t very formal there and I could come and sit in if I wanted to. She said I wouldn’t be a proper student until the next year, but I could sit in and observe the classes. Daddy told me about what Miss Daniel said the next day. He asked if I would like to go. I enthusiastically told him yes.
Mommy told me what to expect at school and gave me some instructions about how I should behave. She asked me what I would do if I needed to pee. I said I would go outside and pee. “No, raise your hand and when the teacher asks what you want, say, ‘May I be excused?’” Excused for what? Why couldn’t I say what I meant? That didn’t seem logical to me, but I accepted it.
Mommy got me out of bed Monday morning and fixed breakfast for me. She fixed me a lunch while I ate. I walked alone to the road and turned left to the house where the Gray family lived. Three or four Gray children attended Acord Mountain School. I walked to school with them. I remember wondering if we would ever get there. It seemed like a long way up to the school. When we got to the school, I went in and looked around. There were about twenty desks in the room. Each one had a folding seat with a desk behind it. Students sat on one piece of furniture and used the desk attached to the seat in front of him. Each desk had a hole in it for a bottle of ink. We didn’t use ink. I saw my first cloakroom. One of the Grays told me to take my coat off and hang it up there. There was a coal stove and a contraption I had never seen before. When I asked about it, I was told that it was a water pump. One of the kids showed me how to fold a piece of paper into a drinking cup. When the handle was pumped, water appeared. A blackboard covered the entire width of the wall behind the teacher’s desk. It was really black, not green like most are today. The chalk we used was yellow. Large cursive letters of the alphabet printed on green cardboard hung in a line above the blackboard.
The teacher gave the second, third, and fourth graders some brief instructions to get them started. She then brought the first graders to the blackboard and started teaching them to draw circles and straight lines. They hadn’t started forming letters yet. I thought they must not be very smart. I sat quietly and watched. Halfway through the morning, the teacher announced that it was time for recess. Mommy had not said anything about recess. I didn’t know what to expect. All of the children went outside to play. Miss Daniel got half a sandwich out of her lunch and took it outside to eat. It looked so good. It had been made with meat that was not bologna, mayonnaise, and a big slice of tomato. Miss Daniel saw me eyeballing her sandwich and told me that I could eat part of my lunch during recess if I wanted to.
After I had been going to school for a few days, a few of the older girls took me into the other room after we had eaten lunch. They asked me to read to them out of their schoolbooks. I did. One girl got a dictionary and asked me to pronounce some pretty big words. After pronouncing one long word, I heard one of them say that she didn’t even know how to say that word.
Miss Daniel gave me a report card every six weeks just like she did for the other children. She promoted me to the second grade at the end of the year. Lotus Blankenship was the teacher when school resumed the next fall. Charlie Gray had missed most of the first grade because of sickness, and was a grade behind the other children his age. He was a fellow second grader. We would finish our assignments long before the other second graders. Remember that the teacher had four grades to keep occupied. Charlie and I would talk, laugh, and throw paper while Mrs. Blankenship was teaching to the other three grades. Mrs. Blankenship administered the only corporal punishment I ever received in school. On two occasions, she grabbed the fingers of my right hand, bent them back, and struck the palm of my hand sharply with a ruler. That got my attention. That kind of punishment is not politically correct today. About six weeks into the school year, Mrs. Blankenship asked Charlie and me if we would like to move to the third grade. We both said yes. She gave each of us a note to take home for our parents to sign. Charlie and I were in the third grade the next day. I was asked to take my turn reading aloud a few days later. I came to a word that I hadn’t seen before, but I didn’t even slow down. I pronounced it the way it would be if the English language had consistent rules of pronunciation. I was embarrassed when the teacher corrected me. The word was “island”.
When I started the fourth grade in September 1955, there was yet another teacher. She was Maud Daniel’s sister, Joanne Sweeney. Mr. Wade came into our room after lunch on the first day of the fourth grade. He told all of the boys to follow him. We went to the boys’ toilet. He said he wanted every one of us to go in and take a look. When my turn came, I walked in and saw that somebody had unrolled about ten rolls of toilet paper. Toilet paper was everywhere. After each of us had his turn, Mr. Wade said, “I want to know which one of you did that.”
A first grade boy said, “I did, Mister.”
“Why?”
“What is that stuff, anyway?” was the boy’s reply. He had never seen toilet paper. He didn’t get a whipping, but he didn’t do that again. My education at Acord Mountain School ended when we moved to Glen View in October of that year.
Biography - Part Three - Jenny's Gap
Jenny’s Gap was the name given to the area along the dirt road between Slab Fork and Lester. The maps say Jenny Gap is the place at the head of the creek where the road passes from the head of the creek that flows to Slab Fork (Guyandotte River drainage) to a small stream that flows to Lester (Coal River drainage), but I’ve always heard it called Jenny’s Gap. The Virginian Railroad paralleled the road and passed through a tunnel at Jenny’s Gap proper. I have been told that the Virginian and the C&O Railroad both raced to build a railroad through the area and there was room for only one tunnel at Jenny’s Gap. The Virginian won and the C&O railroad grade was converted into a road for cars. That road is now WV Route 54.
I was about four years old when Daddy bought a lease at Jenny’s Gap. The house was located about a quarter of a mile from the road. The path to the house went down a small bank at the road where we parked our car, across a small bridge, across a level area to the railroad embankment, up and across the Virginian Railroad, across fields and three footlogs. The footlogs had been constructed by splitting poplar logs and laying the two halves side by side across the creek. Rocks were placed under the ends to keep them from rocking. If you didn’t pay attention to where you were walking, you could easily fall into the creek.
The weather was cold the day we moved into our new house. I can remember that I had a red and black plaid wool coat on. I couldn’t carry a heavy load, but I was pressed into duty as a packhorse that day. We didn’t have a dolly or a paved driveway, so it was a big job carrying all of our possessions from the road to the house. The house was a small “Jenny Lind” three-room house. The living room had just enough room for a couch, a chair, a floor lamp, and a coal stove. The kitchen had a coal cook stove, a “Hoosier” cabinet, and a table with four chairs. The only bedroom held my parents’ full bed, a small foldaway bed for the three children, a four-drawer chest of drawers, and a washstand that was given to us by my Grandma Cook. For some reason, Mommy always thumb tacked a piece of flowered fabric to it around the upper edge. That made it harder to open the drawers, but it hid the fact that some of the veneer had peeled off. A lamp with a blue glass shade that completely covered the bulb rested on the wash stand next to my parents’ bed. I have that lamp, but it isn’t in working condition. The corner closest to the living room and front porch had a broom handle nailed into the corner. That was our closet. Mommy had a piece of fabric that matched the wash stand hanging from piece of wire to hide the clothes that hung there. How many families of five could hang all of its clothes on a single broomstick nailed in a corner?
We got our water from a spring up a little hollow about 50 or 60 yards behind the house. Somebody had put a piece of two-inch galvanized pipe into the hillside. A stream of water flowed out of the pipe. We would put an empty bucket on a flat rock under the pipe and wait for it to fill up. We did not have a bathroom. We did not even have an outside toilet. We had two laurel thickets. Daddy always used the laurel thicket to the left of the path to the spring. Everybody else used the laurel patch to the right. It was important to watch where you walked. I can’t say for certain, but I think we did have toilet paper.
Daddy once told me that he and Earl Birchfield carried our kitchen stove from the road to our house. They didn’t have a dolly. It had to be carried. I don’t know many men today who could or would do that. Our next home was connected to a natural gas utility line, so we left the stove in the house for the next owner. One sunny morning, Daddy and a man who worked at the Slab Fork company store, delivered a Westinghouse refrigerator. I believe it was on a dolly, but they had some trouble taking it over the footlogs and some of the rougher spots in the path. The box it came in became our playhouse for a few days until the rain ruined it.
At the end of a Sunday visit to Grandpa Cook’s house, Grandpa gave Daddy a hot pepper. On our way home, our parents were very emphatic when they told us not to bother the pepper. My memories of the incident include a foot-long, bright red pepper with the same general shape as a banana pepper. Mommy put the pepper on top of the refrigerator after we got home. The next day, while my parents were working in the garden, I saw my chance to learn more about this pepper. I figured if they didn’t want little children to get close to it, it must a really good pepper that the adults wanted to keep for themselves. Anyway, I pulled a kitchen chair over to the refrigerator, reached up as high as I could, and grabbed the pepper. Joyce had been watching me and came over to see the pepper. Wayne would have been about a year old, so he didn’t get involved. It must have been a very hot pepper because our tender hands soon began to burn. I hastily put the pepper back on top of the refrigerator. Our hands kept burning more and more. We began to cry. We rubbed our eyes. You can probably guess what happened next. Our eyes began to burn. For some reason, we then put our hands in our mouth as we cried. Guess what—our mouths began to burn. Mommy heard us crying and came to the house to investigate. Our hands, eyes, and mouths burned for a long time.
We had a beech tree in our back yard. Mommy showed me how to open the hard husk and eat the small kernel inside. They were tasty and I ate a lot of them.
Okla McKinney, Grandma Keaton’s youngest brother, lived across the road from our house for a part of the time we lived at Jenny’s Gap. He gave me a pup during one of our visits. Daddy named him “Raider”. I never did see his name written out. I thought his name was “Rater” for many years. When Raider was around eight or nine months old, he somehow got one of Mommy’s shoes. He started chewing on it. Mommy hollered for him to stop and ran to rescue her shoe. Raider ran under the house where the floor joists were close to the ground and continued chewing. Mommy was too big to fit under that part of the house, so she got a broom and started poking the dog with the handle. He would let out a big yelp every time she poked him. She was able to retrieve her shoe, but it had a big hole chewed in it. I’m pretty sure that was the only pair of shoes she had. She got a new pair of shoes the next day. Daddy traded Raider for a shotgun a few years later. The next time he saw the man who traded for the dog, Daddy asked him how Raider was doing. The man told Daddy, “That dog was crazy. I took him rabbit hunting and didn’t even bring him home. I shot him.”
Daddy worked the evening shift at Slab Fork, and usually slept until 10:00 or 10:30 each morning. Mommy would sometimes tell us to go across the creek and play so we wouldn’t wake Daddy up. We had very few toys. Very few. One thing we did have, and I can’t remember how we got it, was a small red and white porcelain saucepan. We called it a little pot. It was handy for carrying water from the creek to make mud pies.
One Saturday night, Daddy brought some men that I didn’t know to the house. They stayed outside in the yard while Daddy came in and got a good flashlight. I wanted to go outside to see what was happening, but I wasn’t allowed to. Suddenly, there was a shot. The men appeared to be Daddy’s friends, so I didn’t think they were shooting each other. Daddy came in the house with a .22 bolt-action rifle. He had traded some of our chickens for the rifle. When we went across the creek to play the next morning, we made a terrible discovery. The shooting victim was lying near the cliff. Our red and white pot had a small hole in the bottom. Dead center. Daddy had shot the rifle to see if would shoot what he aimed at. It did. We were saddened by our loss. I would later carry that Remington bolt action .22 rifle a lot of miles when Daddy and I went coon hunting.
The first television I ever saw belonged to Earl Birchfield. We went to his house at the mouth of Old Slab one wintry Saturday night. When we walked into the house, we had a hard time getting in. The living room was full of people watching Earl’s new television set. I remember seeing one show that looked like it was being televised from a barn. Grand Ole Opry stars like Ernest Tubb, Carl Smith, and Webb Pierce were singing. Everybody liked that show.
I can remember the first time I had a bottle of pop that I didn’t have to share. I was about five years old. We drove to Slab Fork on a Saturday night. Daddy let Mommy, Joyce, and Wayne out of the car where somebody was having either a bridal shower or a baby shower. I don’t remember which. Daddy and I went to Jerry Keaton’s house in lower Slab Fork. We watched television with Jerry and his oldest son, Ronnie. Jerry went into the kitchen and came back with pop for all four of us. Mine was a 6.5 ounce bottle of Grapette. Back then, I wasn’t choosy about what flavor I drank. That was a memorable night for me. I could not believe my good fortune.
I can’t remember not being able to read. The earliest recollection I have about learning how to read was sitting in my Grandpa Keaton’s lap while he helped me read a book. The main character in the book was a little boy named “Little Algernon”. I haven’t seen another copy of the book anywhere. The book was probably destroyed when Grandpa Keaton’s house burned in 1956 or 1957. Grandma Keaton used to laugh when she would tell about seeing me on the floor reading the Sunday funnies to my cousin Herbert Keaton when I was about five years old. Herbert is almost nine years older than I am.
One morning I asked Daddy to draw me a map of the United States. He drew just enough of a map to satisfy me. It wasn’t of the same quality found in a World Atlas. After he went to work, I started asking Mommy, “What is this state?” She would give me the name of a state in the general area. She was listening to Art Linkletter’s radio program and soon tired of playing my game.
I was about four years old when Daddy bought a lease at Jenny’s Gap. The house was located about a quarter of a mile from the road. The path to the house went down a small bank at the road where we parked our car, across a small bridge, across a level area to the railroad embankment, up and across the Virginian Railroad, across fields and three footlogs. The footlogs had been constructed by splitting poplar logs and laying the two halves side by side across the creek. Rocks were placed under the ends to keep them from rocking. If you didn’t pay attention to where you were walking, you could easily fall into the creek.
The weather was cold the day we moved into our new house. I can remember that I had a red and black plaid wool coat on. I couldn’t carry a heavy load, but I was pressed into duty as a packhorse that day. We didn’t have a dolly or a paved driveway, so it was a big job carrying all of our possessions from the road to the house. The house was a small “Jenny Lind” three-room house. The living room had just enough room for a couch, a chair, a floor lamp, and a coal stove. The kitchen had a coal cook stove, a “Hoosier” cabinet, and a table with four chairs. The only bedroom held my parents’ full bed, a small foldaway bed for the three children, a four-drawer chest of drawers, and a washstand that was given to us by my Grandma Cook. For some reason, Mommy always thumb tacked a piece of flowered fabric to it around the upper edge. That made it harder to open the drawers, but it hid the fact that some of the veneer had peeled off. A lamp with a blue glass shade that completely covered the bulb rested on the wash stand next to my parents’ bed. I have that lamp, but it isn’t in working condition. The corner closest to the living room and front porch had a broom handle nailed into the corner. That was our closet. Mommy had a piece of fabric that matched the wash stand hanging from piece of wire to hide the clothes that hung there. How many families of five could hang all of its clothes on a single broomstick nailed in a corner?
We got our water from a spring up a little hollow about 50 or 60 yards behind the house. Somebody had put a piece of two-inch galvanized pipe into the hillside. A stream of water flowed out of the pipe. We would put an empty bucket on a flat rock under the pipe and wait for it to fill up. We did not have a bathroom. We did not even have an outside toilet. We had two laurel thickets. Daddy always used the laurel thicket to the left of the path to the spring. Everybody else used the laurel patch to the right. It was important to watch where you walked. I can’t say for certain, but I think we did have toilet paper.
Daddy once told me that he and Earl Birchfield carried our kitchen stove from the road to our house. They didn’t have a dolly. It had to be carried. I don’t know many men today who could or would do that. Our next home was connected to a natural gas utility line, so we left the stove in the house for the next owner. One sunny morning, Daddy and a man who worked at the Slab Fork company store, delivered a Westinghouse refrigerator. I believe it was on a dolly, but they had some trouble taking it over the footlogs and some of the rougher spots in the path. The box it came in became our playhouse for a few days until the rain ruined it.
At the end of a Sunday visit to Grandpa Cook’s house, Grandpa gave Daddy a hot pepper. On our way home, our parents were very emphatic when they told us not to bother the pepper. My memories of the incident include a foot-long, bright red pepper with the same general shape as a banana pepper. Mommy put the pepper on top of the refrigerator after we got home. The next day, while my parents were working in the garden, I saw my chance to learn more about this pepper. I figured if they didn’t want little children to get close to it, it must a really good pepper that the adults wanted to keep for themselves. Anyway, I pulled a kitchen chair over to the refrigerator, reached up as high as I could, and grabbed the pepper. Joyce had been watching me and came over to see the pepper. Wayne would have been about a year old, so he didn’t get involved. It must have been a very hot pepper because our tender hands soon began to burn. I hastily put the pepper back on top of the refrigerator. Our hands kept burning more and more. We began to cry. We rubbed our eyes. You can probably guess what happened next. Our eyes began to burn. For some reason, we then put our hands in our mouth as we cried. Guess what—our mouths began to burn. Mommy heard us crying and came to the house to investigate. Our hands, eyes, and mouths burned for a long time.
We had a beech tree in our back yard. Mommy showed me how to open the hard husk and eat the small kernel inside. They were tasty and I ate a lot of them.
Okla McKinney, Grandma Keaton’s youngest brother, lived across the road from our house for a part of the time we lived at Jenny’s Gap. He gave me a pup during one of our visits. Daddy named him “Raider”. I never did see his name written out. I thought his name was “Rater” for many years. When Raider was around eight or nine months old, he somehow got one of Mommy’s shoes. He started chewing on it. Mommy hollered for him to stop and ran to rescue her shoe. Raider ran under the house where the floor joists were close to the ground and continued chewing. Mommy was too big to fit under that part of the house, so she got a broom and started poking the dog with the handle. He would let out a big yelp every time she poked him. She was able to retrieve her shoe, but it had a big hole chewed in it. I’m pretty sure that was the only pair of shoes she had. She got a new pair of shoes the next day. Daddy traded Raider for a shotgun a few years later. The next time he saw the man who traded for the dog, Daddy asked him how Raider was doing. The man told Daddy, “That dog was crazy. I took him rabbit hunting and didn’t even bring him home. I shot him.”
Daddy worked the evening shift at Slab Fork, and usually slept until 10:00 or 10:30 each morning. Mommy would sometimes tell us to go across the creek and play so we wouldn’t wake Daddy up. We had very few toys. Very few. One thing we did have, and I can’t remember how we got it, was a small red and white porcelain saucepan. We called it a little pot. It was handy for carrying water from the creek to make mud pies.
One Saturday night, Daddy brought some men that I didn’t know to the house. They stayed outside in the yard while Daddy came in and got a good flashlight. I wanted to go outside to see what was happening, but I wasn’t allowed to. Suddenly, there was a shot. The men appeared to be Daddy’s friends, so I didn’t think they were shooting each other. Daddy came in the house with a .22 bolt-action rifle. He had traded some of our chickens for the rifle. When we went across the creek to play the next morning, we made a terrible discovery. The shooting victim was lying near the cliff. Our red and white pot had a small hole in the bottom. Dead center. Daddy had shot the rifle to see if would shoot what he aimed at. It did. We were saddened by our loss. I would later carry that Remington bolt action .22 rifle a lot of miles when Daddy and I went coon hunting.
The first television I ever saw belonged to Earl Birchfield. We went to his house at the mouth of Old Slab one wintry Saturday night. When we walked into the house, we had a hard time getting in. The living room was full of people watching Earl’s new television set. I remember seeing one show that looked like it was being televised from a barn. Grand Ole Opry stars like Ernest Tubb, Carl Smith, and Webb Pierce were singing. Everybody liked that show.
I can remember the first time I had a bottle of pop that I didn’t have to share. I was about five years old. We drove to Slab Fork on a Saturday night. Daddy let Mommy, Joyce, and Wayne out of the car where somebody was having either a bridal shower or a baby shower. I don’t remember which. Daddy and I went to Jerry Keaton’s house in lower Slab Fork. We watched television with Jerry and his oldest son, Ronnie. Jerry went into the kitchen and came back with pop for all four of us. Mine was a 6.5 ounce bottle of Grapette. Back then, I wasn’t choosy about what flavor I drank. That was a memorable night for me. I could not believe my good fortune.
I can’t remember not being able to read. The earliest recollection I have about learning how to read was sitting in my Grandpa Keaton’s lap while he helped me read a book. The main character in the book was a little boy named “Little Algernon”. I haven’t seen another copy of the book anywhere. The book was probably destroyed when Grandpa Keaton’s house burned in 1956 or 1957. Grandma Keaton used to laugh when she would tell about seeing me on the floor reading the Sunday funnies to my cousin Herbert Keaton when I was about five years old. Herbert is almost nine years older than I am.
One morning I asked Daddy to draw me a map of the United States. He drew just enough of a map to satisfy me. It wasn’t of the same quality found in a World Atlas. After he went to work, I started asking Mommy, “What is this state?” She would give me the name of a state in the general area. She was listening to Art Linkletter’s radio program and soon tired of playing my game.
Biography - Part Two - Slab Fork
We moved from Hotchkiss to a company house in Slab Fork when I was very young. I don’t remember living in Hotchkiss, but I do have a few memories of the second company house in Slab Fork. I have been told that I solemnly watched our furniture being moved across the road to another house without saying a word. However, when somebody started out the door with my bed, I started crying. It was actually a folding cot-size bed.
One of the neighborhood boys named Tommy went under our house and got an apple out of a bushel basket. I had strict orders from Daddy to leave the apples alone. When I told Mommy what Tommy had done, she wasn’t concerned and told me Tommy could keep the apple and eat it. I remember being confused. I fully expected Tommy to get a switching.
Our next-door neighbor was Otto Graham. One of his daughters had recently married and lived in a house nearby. I could walk down a path behind the houses to visit her without getting near the main road. Otto’s daughter introduced me to iced tea one afternoon. She was amused that I liked it so much. She would pour some in a glass and giggle as I drank it down.
My only sister Joyce was born April 25, 1950, while we lived at Slab Fork. My brother Wayne was born May 17, 1951. Wayne had jaundice and spent some time in the hospital. I can remember waiting in the car near the Beckley Hospital while Wayne saw the doctor. During one hospital visit, Daddy went into the hospital and left Joyce and me in the car. He came back a while later with two small bottles of Coca-Cola. He asked us if we wanted to share one. Of course we did. Why wouldn’t we? He gave me the bottle and I started drinking it the only way I knew how. I stuck the bottle into my mouth about an inch and tilted my head back. After some liquid had run into my mouth, I brought the bottle down and tried to retain as much of the cola in my mouth as I could while removing the bottle from my mouth. Daddy was horrified. He showed us how to put the bottle up to our lips and close them when we had enough coke in our mouth.
Daddy learned to play the banjo when he was young. His older brother Henry taught many of his brothers and sisters to play a musical instrument. Daddy spent about $135.00 for a Gibson RB-100 banjo in 1951. That was a lot of money then. He really loved that banjo. He played music with others in the area. The sessions were usually at somebody’s house, but they would occasionally play Saturday night at a school. Daddy sometimes took the whole family with him and sometimes we stayed home.
One of Mommy’s friends and her daughter came to visit us one hot summer afternoon. The daughter was about my age and we began playing in the house. We were running and somehow managed to knock one of the family’s most precious belongings off the top of a chest of drawers. It was a General Electric oscillating fan about a foot in diameter. Remember, this was a long time before air conditioners were in common use. A big chunk of the plastic (Bakelite I think) enclosure around the fan motor was broken off. I was relieved when Mommy picked it up, plugged it into the outlet, and it worked. We continued to use that fan for many years and every time I looked at it, I remembered that I was responsible for the fact that it wasn’t pretty any more.
I can remember visiting a Milam family who lived in the upper part of Slab Fork. It was in the afternoon while Mr. Milam and Daddy were working. I think Mrs. Milam was called “Boots” and her son was “J.D.”. J.D. had the best toy I had ever seen. It was a car big enough to ride in and it had pedals. I could not imagine how it would feel to be rich enough to own a toy like that. Somewhere there is a picture of me sitting on a fence in front of our house in Slab Fork. Mr. Wender who ran a jewelry store in Sophia took it. His wife would be my fourth grade teacher. We didn’t have a refrigerator in Slab Fork. Daddy would go to the company store two or three times a week to buy milk and other perishables. I went behind the counter to admire the candy display during one visit. Daddy told me that the storekeeper kept a gun behind the counter to shoot people who go behind the counter. I still feel uncomfortable behind a store counter.
One of the neighborhood boys named Tommy went under our house and got an apple out of a bushel basket. I had strict orders from Daddy to leave the apples alone. When I told Mommy what Tommy had done, she wasn’t concerned and told me Tommy could keep the apple and eat it. I remember being confused. I fully expected Tommy to get a switching.
Our next-door neighbor was Otto Graham. One of his daughters had recently married and lived in a house nearby. I could walk down a path behind the houses to visit her without getting near the main road. Otto’s daughter introduced me to iced tea one afternoon. She was amused that I liked it so much. She would pour some in a glass and giggle as I drank it down.
My only sister Joyce was born April 25, 1950, while we lived at Slab Fork. My brother Wayne was born May 17, 1951. Wayne had jaundice and spent some time in the hospital. I can remember waiting in the car near the Beckley Hospital while Wayne saw the doctor. During one hospital visit, Daddy went into the hospital and left Joyce and me in the car. He came back a while later with two small bottles of Coca-Cola. He asked us if we wanted to share one. Of course we did. Why wouldn’t we? He gave me the bottle and I started drinking it the only way I knew how. I stuck the bottle into my mouth about an inch and tilted my head back. After some liquid had run into my mouth, I brought the bottle down and tried to retain as much of the cola in my mouth as I could while removing the bottle from my mouth. Daddy was horrified. He showed us how to put the bottle up to our lips and close them when we had enough coke in our mouth.
Daddy learned to play the banjo when he was young. His older brother Henry taught many of his brothers and sisters to play a musical instrument. Daddy spent about $135.00 for a Gibson RB-100 banjo in 1951. That was a lot of money then. He really loved that banjo. He played music with others in the area. The sessions were usually at somebody’s house, but they would occasionally play Saturday night at a school. Daddy sometimes took the whole family with him and sometimes we stayed home.
One of Mommy’s friends and her daughter came to visit us one hot summer afternoon. The daughter was about my age and we began playing in the house. We were running and somehow managed to knock one of the family’s most precious belongings off the top of a chest of drawers. It was a General Electric oscillating fan about a foot in diameter. Remember, this was a long time before air conditioners were in common use. A big chunk of the plastic (Bakelite I think) enclosure around the fan motor was broken off. I was relieved when Mommy picked it up, plugged it into the outlet, and it worked. We continued to use that fan for many years and every time I looked at it, I remembered that I was responsible for the fact that it wasn’t pretty any more.
I can remember visiting a Milam family who lived in the upper part of Slab Fork. It was in the afternoon while Mr. Milam and Daddy were working. I think Mrs. Milam was called “Boots” and her son was “J.D.”. J.D. had the best toy I had ever seen. It was a car big enough to ride in and it had pedals. I could not imagine how it would feel to be rich enough to own a toy like that. Somewhere there is a picture of me sitting on a fence in front of our house in Slab Fork. Mr. Wender who ran a jewelry store in Sophia took it. His wife would be my fourth grade teacher. We didn’t have a refrigerator in Slab Fork. Daddy would go to the company store two or three times a week to buy milk and other perishables. I went behind the counter to admire the candy display during one visit. Daddy told me that the storekeeper kept a gun behind the counter to shoot people who go behind the counter. I still feel uncomfortable behind a store counter.
Biography - Part One
As I begin writing this, I am hopeful that some of my descendants will read this and gain a better understanding of some of the rituals and beliefs in this family. I am Roy Raymond Keaton and Irma Candis Cook Keaton’s oldest child. I first saw the light of day at seven o’clock, July 3, 1948 in Hotchkiss, Raleigh County, West Virginia. Doctor Roland P. Sharp from Mullens had just finished delivering another baby a few miles down the road at Maben. My parents were living in a small two-room house owned by my Grandpa, Lonnie Cook. The house was torn down in the early 1960’s when WV Route 54 was widened to two lanes and paved. Hotchkiss had a post office in my great-uncle Lacy Cook’s store until about 1960.
Daddy was born April 26, 1927 and grew up about a mile up a hollow called Old Slab near Hotchkiss. All but the head of Old Slab is in Wyoming County. Hotchkiss is in Raleigh County. Daddy attended a one-room school, the Birchfield School for eight years. It was located about half-way between his home and the mouth of Old Slab. Daddy’s Grandpa Keaton, Henry Jared Keaton, had provided some of the books that were in the school’s library. Daddy attended Mullens High School for almost three years. He interrupted his education to enlist in the US Navy in the spring of 1945. Daddy’s older brother Henry was killed in Europe August 9, 1944. His oldest brother, Basil, was killed in Europe February 8, 1945. Daddy told me that he felt like he had to do what he could to take their place and continue the fight. World War II ended before Daddy finished basic training at Great Lakes. He crossed the Pacific Ocean on the USS Pine Island, a seaplane tender. The ship visited the Japanese island of Saipan and Shanghai, China. After his discharge from the Navy, he began working as an underground miner at Slab Fork, WV. He worked the evening shift in No. 8 Mine for more than thirty years. Both of my grandpas worked in the preparation plant at Slab Fork.
Mommy was born August 16, 1932 at Hotchkiss. She attended the one-room school in Hotchkiss. She stayed at Glen View with her sister Eunice and attended Glen White Junior High School for a year. Mommy was barely fifteen when she married. Daddy told me that he, Mommy, and my Grandpa Lonnie Cook drove to Stewart’s Creek, North Carolina, near Mount Airy, to get married. The date was September 12, 1947. I think they stayed a few days with relatives in the area before driving back to West Virginia.
Mommy and Daddy were acquainted with each other for several years before they were married. The Keatons got their mail at Hotchkiss and everybody knew everybody who lived within a five-mile radius. In addition, Daddy’s brother Henry had married Mommy’s sister Eunice April 18, 1942.
My parents spent about $1,000 at Modern Furniture for their household furnishings. Some of the items were a couch, a matching chair, a full-size Simmons bed, a floor lamp, and a chest of drawers. Kitchen items included a wood stove, a Hoosier cabinet and oak chairs to go with a kitchen table (We didn’t have a dining room.) they got somewhere else. Daddy used to joke that somebody had made our kitchen table from a toilet in Hotchkiss. We got along without a refrigerator until I was about four years old.
Daddy was born April 26, 1927 and grew up about a mile up a hollow called Old Slab near Hotchkiss. All but the head of Old Slab is in Wyoming County. Hotchkiss is in Raleigh County. Daddy attended a one-room school, the Birchfield School for eight years. It was located about half-way between his home and the mouth of Old Slab. Daddy’s Grandpa Keaton, Henry Jared Keaton, had provided some of the books that were in the school’s library. Daddy attended Mullens High School for almost three years. He interrupted his education to enlist in the US Navy in the spring of 1945. Daddy’s older brother Henry was killed in Europe August 9, 1944. His oldest brother, Basil, was killed in Europe February 8, 1945. Daddy told me that he felt like he had to do what he could to take their place and continue the fight. World War II ended before Daddy finished basic training at Great Lakes. He crossed the Pacific Ocean on the USS Pine Island, a seaplane tender. The ship visited the Japanese island of Saipan and Shanghai, China. After his discharge from the Navy, he began working as an underground miner at Slab Fork, WV. He worked the evening shift in No. 8 Mine for more than thirty years. Both of my grandpas worked in the preparation plant at Slab Fork.
Mommy was born August 16, 1932 at Hotchkiss. She attended the one-room school in Hotchkiss. She stayed at Glen View with her sister Eunice and attended Glen White Junior High School for a year. Mommy was barely fifteen when she married. Daddy told me that he, Mommy, and my Grandpa Lonnie Cook drove to Stewart’s Creek, North Carolina, near Mount Airy, to get married. The date was September 12, 1947. I think they stayed a few days with relatives in the area before driving back to West Virginia.
Mommy and Daddy were acquainted with each other for several years before they were married. The Keatons got their mail at Hotchkiss and everybody knew everybody who lived within a five-mile radius. In addition, Daddy’s brother Henry had married Mommy’s sister Eunice April 18, 1942.
My parents spent about $1,000 at Modern Furniture for their household furnishings. Some of the items were a couch, a matching chair, a full-size Simmons bed, a floor lamp, and a chest of drawers. Kitchen items included a wood stove, a Hoosier cabinet and oak chairs to go with a kitchen table (We didn’t have a dining room.) they got somewhere else. Daddy used to joke that somebody had made our kitchen table from a toilet in Hotchkiss. We got along without a refrigerator until I was about four years old.
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