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.
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