Part 3 of Beyond The Cotton Fields. This portion of my first book shares stories about the days when we picked cotton by hand on the farm, The joys of riding the school bus and a few of my relatives.

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COTTON PICK’N TIME

Cotton… one little word consisting of six letters, but the wealth and misery it has caused over the centuries is immeasurable.

It was domesticated as a crop over 5,000 years ago in India and Pakistan. Alexander the Great brought it back to Europe with him. It was worn by wealthy Romans and it eventually launched the industrial revolution.

It may have been part of the expansion of the British Empire as they moved into India to obtain fabric for their citizens. And it may have been a force in the Revolutionary War as Great Britain fought to hold onto the colonies which were growing cotton that was exported to her cotton mills.

Eli Whitney nearly went broke trying to get the courts to enforce his patent rights on the cotton gin he invented

It shadowed the Civil War as plantation owners fought for state’s rights to preserve slavery so their crops could be planted and harvested.

It is the fabric we first wrap our babies in and in some instances, it may be the fabric our dead are buried in. It makes up the clothes we wear and it is in some of the foods we eat. It would be hard to imagine life without it.

Cotton… it has made a lasting impression on my memories of growing up in Winston County.

When I reflect back on the Octobers of my youth I always think about picking cotton. We did not have an extremely large farm, but the land did provide a living for us at one time. Not all of it was crop land. Part of the property was pasture, timber and swamp land.

The crop land was planted in oats, wheat and rye grass for hay. Several acres were planted in corn that we used for food and livestock feed. We raised a few cattle and horses, so we also needed pasture land for them. But, the most prominent crop of the area was cotton and at one time we probably had 40 or 60 acres of cotton.

We used a Super A Farm-All to plant and cultivate the cotton. Before I was born mules and horse drawn equipment were used to plant the crop. Both of these methods would be obsolete today. Farming today is on a much larger scale and small farms like ours would not provide much of a living for anyone now.

Cotton was planted in the spring and sometime in June we would await the first blooms to appear on the plants. The more blooms, the more likely we would produce a larger crop. Our local paper, The Winston County Journal, would have a picture of the farmer in the county that reported the first cotton bloom. Once, my father was pictured in the paper standing in his field holding up a cotton bloom.

As the cotton grew, so did the grass. We had to go down each row and use a hoe to chop out the grass between the plants that the scratchers on the tractor missed. This was called chopping the cotton. Chopping cotton in Mississippi on hot June and July days was a tough chore. If the grass was not removed it sapped the valuable moisture away from the cotton plants and they would not produce a lot of cotton.

One year my father came up with the idea of using geese to do the weeding or “chopping”. Geese were known to eat the grass while leaving behind the cotton plant. We worked on the fences around one large cotton field to make it escape proof for the geese. A pond was dug on the east side to provide water for them, but the pond turned into an ugly mess after they arrived.

My father located a large flock of geese for sale over in the Mississippi Delta and took a covered horse trailer over there to get them. The day he came home with the geese is one I will never forget. It was a hot, dusty day when he backed the trailer through the gap in the cotton field and closed it just in case the geese went the wrong way and tried to escape the field.

When he opened the trailer door the geese stood there for a moment not knowing what they should do. Their wings had been cropped so they could not fly away. All at once it dawned on them that they could get out of the trailer. They began running out as fast as they could. They hit the dirt running and it was quite a sight. As they ran their necks were moving side to side and their feet were making a patting sound on the ground as they fled across the field in a cloud of hot dust.

It took them about an hour to calm down. Eventually, they found the pond and baled in. There must have been a hundred of them all quacking and honking and making quite a racket. The pond soon became a mess. The geese did two things well. They ate and pooped. There was goose poop everywhere… in the field and especially around the pond. The area around the pond had so much poop on the ground you could not walk near it or you would slip and fall in. It was awful.

When time came to pick the cotton, the pickers complained about having to walk through goose poop. The poop made a mess on their cotton sacks. That was the last year for the geese choppers. Daddy ended up getting rid of the geese. Foxes and other critters helped the geese disappear.

After the blooms appeared so would the boll-weevils. That was when we started spraying with cotton poison. It was really bad stuff. My father had a spray rig on the back of his old John Deere tractor. He would mix the solution and then put on a mask and ride through the fields spraying to kill the weevils. If he had not done that the weevils would have destroyed the crop. The poison had a very strong and distinct odor.

We had no air conditioning and the spray would hang in the air and drift throughout our house. On hot summer nights we would lie in bed and the odor of the spray was so bad we could hardly sleep. We had a couple of fans to move the hot saturated air, but it was not much help. Some nights I would drag my bed by a window and sleep with my head on the window sill to get some fresh air. If there was a light on in the house I could hear the bugs hitting the screen by my head.

On unbearable nights I often slept on the front porch in the swing. The swing grew shorter as I grew older and in my teenage years it was a challenge to fit onto it. I often awoke stiff and sore.

In late September and October we would start picking the cotton. We had no machinery for gathering the cotton. We relied on pickers. We had several sacks that had a strap to go over our shoulders. We bent over, picked the cotton out of the bolls and stuffed it into the sack as we moved slowly down the rows. It was back breaking work and the pay was not very good.

The first pay I got for picking cotton was two cents a pound. We had to pick a lot of cotton to make any money. I have been told my grandmother, Alice Foster, could pick a bale a day in her youth, which was about 500 pounds. That was a lot of cotton for one person to pick. Often the bolls were hard and sharp. When the cotton was pulled out of the bolls it would often prick our fingers. At the end of the day the picker’s fingers were sore and their backs were hurting badly from bending over all day.

When I got off the school bus I would grab a snack, then run off to the fields and pick until dark. Just before dark as the dew was beginning to form we would quit and my father would bring the wagon into the field to “weigh up” the sacks for each picker. There was always friendly wagering about who picked the most that day or who could guess closest to what they actually picked. The winner would get to ride home in the cab of the truck while the rest had to ride in back or in the wagon loaded with the day’s pickings.

I liked to ride in the wagon. I would lie on my back and smell the newly picked cotton while looking up at the stars forming in the night sky. I liked listening to the pickers talk about their day, what they were going to have for supper or who did this or that. Most of the workers were people that lived on the farm. A few lived on other farms that did not raise cotton and some lived in town.

My father would pick them up each morning and take them home in the evenings. On Friday nights he would settle up with everyone. He kept a log (as did the pickers) of each day’s weight and paid them at the end of the week. Some Saturdays we would pick if we were getting behind due to the weather. Some folks would find a way out to the farm on weekends and pick to make extra money.

I remember the workers and hold them dear in my memories. They were good people who had dignity and grace beyond measure. They were poor people struggling to exist day by day. I don’t want to forget them. They touched my life and taught me more than words can say.

I remember some of them singing in the fields as they worked. I remember their laughter and joking in the cotton wagon on the ride back home at the end of a long hard day. Some of them took me along when they went fishing and hunting. When I was young the other children on the farm, my brothers and I all played together. We had a lot of fun and nobody thought anything of it. But, as we grew older there was an invisible wall built between our races. We stopped playing together. We stopped hunting and fishing together.

I am not sure when it was built. It happened so slowly I did not realize it was there until I was older and one day my eyes were opened and I was able to see the wall. It had grown into a monster that was big and ugly. By the time I discovered it years had passed by. I could not believe I had not noticed it being built.

There are times I wonder what they thought of us. I wonder if they were happy. I wonder if they had enough to eat or if they were warm in the winter time. I guess it boils down to we were ignorant. Society had taught us there were differences between us and at the time we just did not realize it did not have to be that way. It was okay for children to play together, but there were unspoken rules for adults. As a result we all missed out on a lot.

There is a saying, “Good fences make good neighbors.” That may be true, but we have to be careful to make sure our fences do not grow into walls and the walls between races, religions and nations must be taken down one brick at a time until they are no longer walls, but fences between good neighbors. For beneath the skin we are all the same. We are all God’s children.

When the wagon was full my father would pull it into town and go to the cotton gin. John Woodward was the owner and he had several sons that helped him run the gin. I was fascinated with the gin. We would pull into a shed that had a scale to weigh the wagon. A worker would climb into the wagon and pull down a vacuum pipe that hung in the air. The vacuum system was started and the cotton was pulled from the wagon and went into the gin building where it was processed.

The cotton was washed, cleaned of dirt and bugs and then dried. The seeds were removed and blown to a seed house where they were weighed separately. Then the cotton went into the press where it was made into a bale. The bale was wrapped in burlap and had wide metal bands strapped around it. Each full bale weighed about 500 pounds.

When the bales came out of the press someone would pull some of the cotton out of the bale and wrap it in a brown paper. That was our sample. Each bale was tagged with a number and the sample had the same number. The seeds were weighed and the farmer was given a receipt for the seeds stored in the seed house.

The cotton was then sent to a warehouse and buyers from cotton mills would take it from there and have it shipped to where it was to be processed. If the seeds were not good quality for selling to seed companies it was sold to feed companies that crushed them for cotton seed oil and the husk was mixed in with livestock feed.

The era of farming cotton as we did it is long gone. Pickers going into the fields, dragging sacks down each row and filling them by hand is probably a thing of the past. There is no more sitting at the edge of the field at noon under a shade tree to eat lunch out of an old lard pail or drinking cold water from a Mason jar. Gone are the days of dipping a gourd into the spring by the house near the swamp to get a cool drink of water before filling jars and carrying them back to the field.

The pickers have been replaced by machines that pick the cotton. The lard buckets are now plastic coolers and the water now comes in bottles bought at the store. There is no more slipping off to the edge of the field to raid a scuppernong vine of its grapes and no more can we ride in the wagon home from the fields as the stars begin to come out at night. Those days have faded into history.

They were bad days and they were good days. Bad, for the fact it was hard work and low pay, but good because of the memories I have of the people I grew up with on the farm. It would be interesting to pull back the curtain of time and visit that era once again. It would be easy to see how hard some of those good old days actually were.

Anas, anas… ANSER! (Duck, duck… GOOSE!)

HOLIDAYS AT OAK HILL FARM

When I was young holidays seemed to be more special than they are today. They were not as commercialized. Every time I get the newspaper out of the driveway it is full of flyers and ads for “The Big Sale”. I guess that is because people have more money they can part with these days.

I have worked shift work for the last 30 years and holidays have become a blur to me. My job has required me to work so many holidays, family birthdays and Sundays that I do not take being off on those days for granted. The holidays of my youth are times I cherish in my memory. Our family would gather together on those special days and where I grew up factories and businesses closed for all the major holidays. In this chapter I would like to share how we celebrated those occasions.

NEW YEAR’S DAY

New Year’s Day was celebrated at our home by watching parades on television in the morning and football in the afternoon. New Year’s Eve was not really that big of a deal for us. In the later years, we stayed up until 11 p.m. and watched New York ring in the new year. But, most of the time the television station we watched went off the air after the 10 o’clock news and we were in bed and asleep before midnight.

Mother always prepared a meal of black-eyed peas, ham and coleslaw. It was supposed to bring us good luck to start the new year off with such a meal. I remember the slaw symbolized wealth and the black eyed peas were supposed to bring good luck.

I have heard that the tradition of a meal of black eyed peas, collards, and hog jowls began around the time of the Civil War. When the Union soldiers came through the south burning fields and destroying crops, they did not know people ate the collard greens. They thought they were weeds. Somehow the farmers’ hogs survived in the woods and the people managed to hold on to a few black eyed peas the soldiers did not find. They felt like they were lucky to have those items to eat after everything else had been taken or destroyed. Thus, it became a tradition to have that for the first meal of the year.

EASTER

Easter, Pascha, or Resurrection Day is the day we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus which took place the third day after the crucifixion about AD 27-33. It falls at some point between late March and late April following the cycle of the moon.

It is linked to the Jewish Passover due to its symbolism and time of the year. The last supper Jesus shared with his disciples was believed to have been a Passover meal. Some say the English name Easter comes from an Anglo-Saxon Goddess of the Dawn who was called Easter, Eastre or Eostre.

We received new shoes and clothes to wear to church at Easter. We had our own chickens so we dyed eggs. Some of the eggs were white and they were easy to dye. Some were brown and they took a little more effort.

The ones I liked the best were the goose eggs. We had a goose and a gander that stayed with our chickens in the chicken yard. The old goose would, normally, lay eggs around Easter and we always tried to get them away from her. The gander would try to defend their territory and anytime we came close to the nest he would hiss and try to bite us!

One of us would try to distract him while another one ran up, pushed the goose off her nest and took the eggs. One year our cousin, Eddie Foster, was with us during such a raid and he was going to distract the gander. Unfortunately, he was not fast enough to out run the gander. The image of him fleeing the chicken yard with the gander half running, half flying and nipping at his butt is forever imprinted in my memory.

When we went to Sunday School we always had the biggest eggs there. The other kids could never figure out where we got those huge eggs. They did not know they were goose eggs.

My Brothers and I were terribly disappointed one year when it rained all Easter weekend. We had a couple dozen Easter eggs that we had dyed and the weather was too bad to go outside and hide them.

Not to be outdone we decided to have our Easter egg hunt in the house. My mother did not think that was a very good idea. She was afraid we might overlook one or two of the eggs and there was nothing that smelled worse than a rotten egg. She did not want that happening in her house.

She came up with the idea of numbering the eggs to be sure we would not overlook one. It seemed like a good plan, but she did not count on Murphy’s Law.

After she had counted all the eggs and scribbled small numbers on them, we took turns hiding them around the house before the inevitable happened. One of us guys forgot where we had hidden all of our eggs and we ended up one egg short.

Mother was frantic. We had to find that missing egg. We looked everywhere imaginable for the one lost egg to no avail. We turned the house upside down, but the one missing egg evaded us.

It was about a week later the ghost of the missing egg began to haunt us. The smell started out very faint and each passing day it seemed to double in intensity. Still, we searched for the egg. It would seem logical that all we had to do was follow the odor and find the egg, but that was not the case. The odor filled one entire end of the house to the extent it was almost unbearable.

Finally, we managed to locate it. One of us had hidden the egg in a shoe that was hanging in a shoe rack on the back of our closet door. Needless to say the shoe was thrown out along with the egg and that was the end of our Easter egg hunts in the house.

One year my parents surprised me with a white Easter rabbit. I don’t remember it, but they said I was crazy about the rabbit and wanted to take it to church with me. Evidently, I loved the rabbit a little too much.

The Sunday School teacher realized the rabbit was in trouble and tried to get me to set it down. The more she tried to get it away, the tighter I held on to it. By the time my folks came to get me the rabbit was dead! They told me it had gone to heaven and when we returned home we had a funeral and buried it in the back yard. That was the last time I got a rabbit for Easter.

MEMORIAL DAY

At one time Memorial Day was celebrated on May 30th, but it is celebrated on the last Monday in May now. It was formerly known as Decoration Day and commemorates the men and women who have died in the US military service.

It began to honor soldiers who died in the Civil War, but after World War I it was expanded to include any war.

I always looked forward to Memorial Day. School was out and we had cut the first hay crop. By the end of May the cotton and corn were in the ground and coming up.

May was the month for memorials in Mississippi. All the country churches had special services to remember the loved ones that had passed on before us. The Saturday prior to their Sunday memorial services was the day families gathered to clean up the cemeteries. Sunday after the services, flowers were placed on the graves.

The stores loved that month because they sold a lot of artificial flowers! Relatives from several states around would come back every year for the memorial services.

That was the time of year I began to fish in earnest. We made our own poles from canes we cut near the creeks. Our bait was what we dug or caught around the farm. We never bought bait, because there was no money for that.

When dry weather set in and the ground was too hard to dig for worms, we caught crickets and grasshoppers. We used anything we thought a fish might bite. Many times we robbed wasp nests and used the larva for bait when we could not find crickets.

There was an art to robbing wasp nests that we had perfected over years of trial and error. Normally, we would take our fishing poles and knock them down. Then we would run off until the wasp quit flying around. After they settled down we would sneak up, grab the nest and put it in a jar.

For the nests that were closer to the ground we learned a trick by watching a friend who was older and wiser. He would hold his breath, walk up to the nests and pick them off the wall of the barn. The wasps would fly all around him, but as long as he did not breathe he never got stung. I could never get up the nerve to try that trick. Years later I learned scientists had proved that insects are attracted to the carbon dioxide we exhale. So, my friend may have been on to something all those years ago.

Gathering wasp nests may have been a little dangerous, but it was certainly manlier than what a buddy of mine did.

When he was younger he ran into an older friend of his who had caught a lot of fish one day. He asked him what he was using for bait and his friend told him he was using grasshoppers.

"How did you find that many grasshoppers?" my buddy asked.

"I catch them with panty hose. I run through a pasture that has a lot of grasshoppers in it and when they fly up they stick to the panty hose. All I have to do is pick them off and put them in a jar."

"You have to be kidding me?"

"Naw, their little legs have all those barbs on them and they stick to the hose. You ought to try it.”

Later that day he went home and put on a pair of panty hose and ran through some tall grass where he knew a lot of grasshoppers were. Sue enough, when they flew up they stuck to his panty hose.

A couple of days after that he ran into his friend and thanked him for the tip about the panty hose. He said, "I thought you were putting me on until I put those panty hose on and ran through the pasture and caught a bunch of grasshoppers."

"Dang! You put them on and ran through the pasture?"

"Yeah, that's what you said I was supposed to do, wasn't it?"

"Not exactly. I normally tie them to my grill and run though the pasture in my truck. I wouldn't dream of putting them on! I bet that was quite a sight to see!"

That was the last time my buddy put on a pair of panty hose.

BIRTHDAYS

My brothers and I have birthdays that are within days of each other. Terry’s birthday is on May 30 which was the day we celebrated Memorial Day in years past. We joked that everything shut down for his birthday.

My birthday is about a week later on June 7th. When I was little my mother always made us a cake on our birthdays. She tried to make them all a little different to make our day seem special. I cannot remember what kind of cakes she made for my brothers, but the cake she always made for me had green icing. Why it was green I do not know. Maybe when I was little, I liked green. But, the green cakes stand out in my memory.

We always received a little something for our birthday present. The one thing I remember the most was an army truck. It was made from heavy metal and it took me a long time to wear it out. I was hard on toys. I felt a need to take them apart to see how they were made.

Tonny’s birthday is two days after mine on June 9th. As you can see my mother was busy making cakes for about a week. The best thing about our birthdays was we were out of school. That meant no shoes! By mid June our feet were as tough as leather and by summer’s end my feet began to look like leather. I hated shoes.

When I was about five or six we had a real birthday party. It was a Davy Crocket party and each of us invited some of our friends from church to come out to the farm. We had one large Davy Crocket cake and everyone had little rifles that shot out a cork stopper at the end of the barrel. Each of us had a little “coon skin hat” as well. The party was our present that year except for a Davy Crocket table lamp we shared in our bedroom.

INDEPENDENCE DAY

Independence Day commemorates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence and is observed on July 4th to celebrate our independence from Great Britain. The Continental Congress voted in secrecy for independence on the 2nd of July. Thomas Jefferson was appointed to write the draft and Congress reworked it. Late on the 4th twelve colonies voted for its adoption. One state, New York, abstained from the vote. Members of Congress signed it on August 2nd.

We always looked forward to the Fourth of July. We had a picnic at either Lake Tiak-O’khata or Choctaw Lake. We would arrive early in the day to save a picnic table and stay all day long. All the stores closed back then for the holiday

Lake Tiak-O’khata was where I learned how to swim. When I was little, my father, brothers and I went to the pond behind our house to swim. One day we made our way pass the cow pies to the pond full of tad-poles and green scum. My brother, Terry, was holding my hand.

Tonny and Daddy were already in the deeper water. They were having a good time while Terry and I stood there in the shallow end watching them. I took a step toward them and my feet slipped out from under me on the slimy pond's bottom.

There I sat on the bottom of the pond, still holding on to Terry's hand, while he continued to watch my father and Tonny. My eyes were open and I could barely see through the mucky water, but I remember seeing a fish swim by in front of me and I looked over and saw my brother’s legs to my left. I kept thinking he would pull me up, but he had not noticed I was under water.

It seemed like an eternity sitting there on the bottom of the pond as I held my breath. Just as I thought I could not hold it any longer, my father happened to glance over at where Terry and I were and he saw only Terry standing there. He hollered for Terry to pull me up and the next thing I knew I was being jerked to the surface as I gasped for a breath of air.

The rest of the afternoon I had to play on the bank while the rest of them swam in the pond.

I loved it when we went to Tallahega Creek where the water was clean and clear. There was a long rope someone had tied from the limb of tall tree near the bank and we would grab it and swing out over the water like Tarzan of the Jungle. The water was never very deep when the weather was warm and I felt safe there.

But, by the time I was about 10 years old the lake near town was where everyone wanted to go to swim. I hated the fact that I did not know how to swim and I could not go beyond the ropes that separated the shallow end from the deeper waters.

I would make my way out to the rope and stand there watching as the older kids swam out to the little dive where all the action seemed to be. The better swimmers would run off the end of the pier, dive in and swim out to the high dive that was in much deeper water.

Finally, my father consented to let me take swimming lessons one summer. My cousin, Dianne Bennett, was five years older than I was and she was the swimming instructor that year. I still remember her telling me to lie on my back as she held out her hands to support me. She told me to take a breath of air and hold it. When I did she, slowly, lowered her hands and I discovered that I could float. Little by little I learned to breathe and still stay above the water.

After that I could go beyond the ropes to the little dive just like the other kids. Then I discovered the fun the other kids had when they went down the big slide into the deeper water. As I got older, I got up the nerve to swim out to the high dive.

Making it all the way out to the high dive was a pivotal moment for me. I did not feel like a little kid anymore. Thanks to Dianne, I had arrived! No more cow pies and pond scum for me... no Sireeeee.

No Fourth of July was complete without a trip to the Ice House on South Spring Street. Not only did the Ice House make ice, but around the Fourth of July they sold watermelons. For a few cents more we could walk into the room where they made the ice and pick out one that was cold. The room was huge and there were massive blocks of ice sitting around waiting to go through a saw that cut them into smaller blocks.

My father had the “gift” of thumping. The thumping gift was being able to “thump” a watermelon and determine how ripe and sweet it would be. He would go through numerous melons until he found just the right one. He never let us down.

LABOR DAY

Labor Day began in 1882 on the first Monday in September by the Central Labor Union to create a day off for the working man. It symbolically marks the end of summer and it became a federal holiday by an Act of Congress in 1884. In 1966, The Muscular Dystrophy Association began holding its annual telethon on Labor Day weekend and was hosted by Jerry Lewis.

Labor Day was always sad for me. It was the official ending of summer and it meant one last chance to go to the lake before school started the next week.

HALLOWEEN

When I was small I loved Halloween. We colored pumpkins, witches and ghosts at school. On Halloween night we went to town and wore our cheap Halloween masks as we went up and down North and South Columbus Avenue. That was where the wealthier people lived and they had the best candy.

There was one elderly gentleman on South Columbus Street who always handed out $100 in silver coins. When the silver dollars were gone he turned out his lights and called it a night. We never got to town early enough to get one of his silver dollars.

The older kids would band together and soap all the windows on Main Street. Every store window was written on with soap. The next morning the street looked trashed. But, the owners would come out with their buckets and sponges to wash the windows. By the time school was out that afternoon all the windows in the town were gleaming.

My parents told me of things that happened on Halloween when they were growing up. People would do some pretty bad things. One year, someone put a cow in their school house and it really made a mess of things.

People would disassemble someone’s wagon and take it to the top of a roof piece by piece and put it back together. A few times things got out of hand and some barns were burned down.

THANKSGIVING

Thanksgiving began in 1578 as a North American holiday in what would later become Canada and it was celebrated on the second Monday in October. Later in the 1600s it was celebrated in November in what became The United States.

A lot of what we were taught as children about celebrating Thanksgiving with the Native Americans was in part due to the settlers in Massachusetts being grateful to Squanto, a Native American who had been enslaved by early settlers and taken to Britain.

When they returned to the new world he taught them how to fish for eel and grow corn. He was, also, their interpreter and without him they may have perished.

Finally, in 1941 a Congressional Act was passed that established Thanksgiving on the 4th Thursday of November.

I have always liked Thanksgiving the best. It is one of the less commercialized holidays, too. There is no pressure to buy gifts or hope we did not forget to send a card to this person or that person. It is a time to reflect and give thanks.

At our home food was the biggest focus. Mother went all out for Thanksgiving. We often had friends or relatives over for our noon meal. She was a wonderful cook and she liked to entertain in her younger years.

I remember one year there were several people at our home for the dinner. (You must remember when I refer to dinner I am speaking of the noon meal. In the South, we had dinner at noon and the evening meal was called supper.) There was a young couple traveling through our area trying to get to their family in another town. Their car broke down in front of our house and we knew they could not make it to their destination for Thanksgiving. Daddy made some calls and someone came out and worked on their car. While their car was being repaired they had Thanksgiving dinner with us.

That was pretty typical around our home. We thought nothing of it. Several days later we received a gift in the mail along with a message. They thanked us for our help and wanted us to know how touched they were sharing our home and dinner that Thanksgiving. Evidently, they had been going through a rough period and being there with us helped them refocus their lives and work out some problems they had been dealing with.

For a few years we had Banty chickens on the farm. They were very small chickens and there were times when we each had a whole Banty for our dinner.

Some Thanksgivings were more memorable than others. We rented an 80 acre farm and an old house in Choctaw County for a few years. The owner was a retired railroad worker and it was the home place where he grew up. We rented his property for $24 a year. He would not rent it to anyone else because we took care of his property.

We kept the place clean and made repairs to the old house. It was more of a very rough cabin than a house. It was in the middle of the Choctaw game refuge. We camped out there often and went deer hunting. None of us ever killed a deer, but we had a good time. We had camp food and lots of camp coffee along with our “deer track soup.”

Many times our cousins, the Bennetts and Fosters, joined us there for the deer seasons. It was more of an adventure than a hunt. We had a metal wood stove that was piped into the chimney. We used it for heating and cooking. There were times the stove got so hot it glowed orange. We all slept in the same room and after the lanterns were put out I would watch the glowing stove until I fell asleep.

Daddy made sleeping bunks with chicken wire for the mattresses. Harry had to bring his own cot because the chicken wire could not hold him up!

There were a few years my father would take us to a sand pit near town where there was a turkey-shoot fund raiser. The money was used to help the people who lived at the poor house on the county farm.

Someone always donated several live turkeys and men would come and pay five dollars for three attempts at shooting a turkey. The turkey was placed in a box about fifty yards away. The box was buried level with the top of the ground and in the top of the box was a hole large enough the turkey could poke his head out and look around.

The men put their money down and waited for their turn to shoot. When the turkey popped his head up through the hole they would take aim and fire. Only open sights were allowed on the rifles to test the shooters marksmanship. Each shooter was allowed only one turkey.

If the turkey was hit the shooter could claim his bounty and take it home to clean and cook for Thanksgiving. Many times there were turkeys that were smart enough not to poke their heads back up after a near miss with a bullet. Those were taken out of the box and auctioned off at the end of the tournament. Everyone seemed to enjoy it…except the turkeys.

CHRISTMAS

The word Christmas originated from the contraction “Christ’s Mass”. According to Italian scholars the church where the tradition of celebrating Christmas on the 25th of December began was near a pagan shrine. It was an effort by the early church to spread Christianity. Archaeologists discovered an underground grotto that they believe was revered by early Romans as the place where a wolf nursed the founders of Rome… Romulus and, his twin, Remus.

For me the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas seemed like an eternity. During those days we walked all over the farm searching for the best tree we could find. It was always a cedar tree and when we found it, we would bring it back to the house and wash it. Sometimes the trees had mice, bugs and bird nests in them.

My father would saw the tree to the height he wanted and then put it in a bucket filled with gravel. The ceilings in our home were an odd nine feet tall. The gravel held the tree in place and let the water travel to the bottom to keep it green longer.

We kept the tree in our living room because that was one room we did not use often and there was seldom any heat there, so the tree did not dry out. There were a few years when we were very young my parents put lights on the tree. My father did not want lights because he was afraid the house would catch on fire.

I learned that three years after Edison invented the light bulb in 1882 the first Christmas tree lights were used. The lights we used were called bubble lights. There was fluid in them and when lit the bubbles moved around inside them. One draw back to those kinds of lights was that they operated in a series. If one bulb blew all the lights would go out.

My father probably got tired of trying to trace down the culprit blown bulb, so the lights on our tree quickly became a thing of the past. Well… it was either the blown bulbs or his fear of burning our house down.

We used a lot of foil icicles and glass ornaments. Once in a while one would slip off the tree and shatter on the hardwood floor. It was like a little bomb going off.

There was a furniture store on North Court Street that had a Santa Claus each Christmas. One year when I was little they took me to see Santa. Someone gave me a lollipop while I was waiting in line and by the time I got to Santa it was very sticky and juicy.

I was sitting on his lap and I was waving my arms around trying to describe what I wanted for Christmas when the inevitable happened… my lollipop became tangled in his beard. Someone had to find a pair of scissors and cut it free. Santa lost part of his beard and I lost my lollipop. I remember hoping that I had not blown it and he would still come to my house.

My mother had a Christmas scene she placed on our television every year. It was a Santa standing by a pile of coal with switches protruding from the snow. She always told me that if I was not good that was what Santa was going to bring me… switches and ashes. After the lollipop incident that was all I could think about. I was going to get switches and ashes that year. Thankfully, that did not happen.

I guess I must have been about 8 or 9 when I decided to wait up one Christmas Eve and catch Santa. I hid behind the living room couch and tied a string from my toe to the door knob so it would wake me when he opened the door. Little did I realize that the door opened inward and there was no way the string would pull on my toe to wake me.

My parents knew I did not have the patience to wait up very long so they humored me. I got cold lying on the floor and decided to go to bed. I did catch Santa a couple of years later. I was almost asleep when I heard a crash. I went to investigate and discovered my parents had dropped my new dump truck onto the floor.

Two of my favorite Christmas toys included the dump truck and my BB gun. Each of us had a shoe box decorated with wrapping paper waiting for Santa. He put oranges, bananas and candy in it. Sometimes, we found fireworks and a little box of raisins.

Fire works were a big part of Christmas. We did not have fireworks on the Fourth of July like people do now. There was too much danger of fire. Winter weather was safer for them so we celebrated Christmas and New Year’s Day with fireworks. There were two brothers, Ronnie and Billy Hathorn, who had a fireworks stand in front of their father’s grocery store on Main Street and that was where we bought our fireworks.

Sometimes, we bought Whistling Chasers, Drop Pops and Roman Candles. The Roman Candles soon came to an end after Daddy caught us shooting them at the cows and horses.

The Sunday before Christmas was always “Cantata” Sunday. That was when our church choirs put on the Christmas program. When we were growing up we were in the church choir. We worked hard for weeks before the service and the night of the Cantata the church was always packed. When the Cantata was over, the mood was definitely set for Christmas.

THE FAMILY VACATION

Our family rarely went on trips. The farm and livestock kept my father tied down and it was nearly impossible to get away. But, there were times we did leave for a day or two and it was normally to visit relatives.

About once a year we would make it down to Jackson and visit our Foster cousins, Marsha and Donna. One time we traveled to Columbia, Tennessee to see my Uncle Reuben, Aunt Alice and my cousins Pat and Becky.

The only real vacation we took as a family was to Memphis in 1959. We had a green 1956 Plymouth, one of those big cars that had huge fins for tail lights. I thought it looked like a big catfish. Of course, there was no air conditioner. The five hour trip on the two lane roads to Memphis seemed like five days.

Our main goal was to visit the zoo. None of us boys had ever seen a zoo, so one can only imagine our amazement at all the exotic animals we encountered. There was certainly nothing like them on our small farm. Like most little boys, the monkeys, giraffes and elephants fascinated us the most.

The zoo was great, but the thing that I remember the most was the drive-in movie and the motel we stayed at. The motel was one of those little motel courts that was popular in the 50s. We had our own little cottage amid about thirty other little pink buildings at the Alamo Plaza Motel.

There was even a swimming pool. I had never gone swimming in a real pool. In those days most of our swimming was done in the creeks and ponds on the farm which we shared with the cattle. I was really looking forward to leaving the zoo and going back to the motel so I could get in the pool. That was not to be the case because it started raining. Not just a little rain, but a full fledged lightning, thunder boomer and gully washer.

My parents were disappointed for us, but there was no way they were going to let us outside with the sky full of lightning. After we ate the sandwiches my mother had packed for us my father had the idea we would all go to a drive-in movie. He thought that should keep our minds off the pool and it would be something affordable for the five of us.

The movie was The Shaggy Dog and we sat there with my father's window down low enough so the speaker could attach to it. The rain was splashing in on him while we watched the movie.

The windows were fogging up from the five of us in the car. Occasionally, Daddy would turn on the windshield wipers to give us a better view. He was afraid the wipers would run the battery down and he did not want to get stranded at the drive-in in Memphis.

Somehow, we managed to see most of the movie with the help of my mother wiping away the fog on the windshield as my brothers and I fought over the popcorn in the back seat.

By the time we made it back to the motel that night my father was cold and wet, but only on his left side. The cottage had a real air conditioner in it and we thought we were in heaven... all of us except my father who was still cold from the soaking he took at the drive-in.

Early the next morning we began our journey back to the farm. As we left the Alamo Plaza, my brothers and I looked one last time at the swimming pool and wished we could have tried it out just once before we left.

But there were horses and cattle waiting for my father back in Winston County… five hours… or five days away. That was the only vacation I remember taking with my family.

Nos ibi tamen sumus? (Are we there yet?)

THE SCHOOL BUS

School buses began running through our county when my father was a boy back in the twenties. In the beginning it was a wagon with a top on it to keep the rain off the children. Those who lived within a mile of the school had to walk.

The one room school my father and uncle attended in our community was about a mile away, so they were not allowed to ride in the wagon. They were supposed to walk, but they hid along the side of the road and when the wagon passed by they ran up behind it and climbed onto the roof for a ride to school. The driver would stop the horses, get down and chase them away.

After several attempts to chase them away he gave up and they continued to sit on the top of the wagon until they got to school. Eventually, the wagon was replaced with some sort of bus. When it went by his house it was going too fast for him to catch and climb on. On days the road was not muddy, my father would ride up behind the bus on his bicycle and hook a stick he had to the bumper of the bus for a “pull” to the school house.

Things were a little different by the time I started to school. Our home was five miles from town on Highway 25 West, or as some referred to it, The Old Robinson Road. My brothers, Terry, Tonny, and I rode the school bus to and from school almost everyday except for rare occasions when my father was going into town or happened to be in town when school let out.

My first bus driver always seemed to have a four or five day old beard. I was scared of him, but his two sons rode the bus and I liked them. If they were okay then he was okay, too.

Fights occasionally broke out, often over insignificant things. Older kids picked on younger kids since grades one through twelve rode the same bus. One day the driver’s son was picking on my brother, Tonny, when my oldest brother, Terry, stepped in to take up for him.

The bus driver stopped the bus at Calvary Church and said to my brother and his son, “If you two want to fight, get off the bus and do it.” My brother landed one quick blow to the boy’s head and the fight was over. All were friends again.

When we got home Terry got into a fight with Tonny. Terry said he made him get into a fight with the other kid on the bus… and he got a spanking for that. He learned it was okay to fight with someone for picking on his little brother, but it was not okay for him to pick on Tonny!

I remember once we were almost home. The stop prior to our house was down a long dead end dirt road where several girls lived. They lived in a small house they rented from our cousins, the Clarks.

We had just turned down the road and gone less than half a mile when the bus slipped off the shoulder of the road and became stuck in a ditch. It had been raining all day and the road was like soup. There was not enough gravel for traction to keep the large bus from sliding. There we all sat on the bus at a 45 degree angle in the ditch.

There were no cell phones back then and we knew it would be an hour before anyone missed us. The only way out of the bus was through the rear emergency exit. Of course all the kids were excited and we were beginning to get loud. The bus driver quickly nipped the excitement in the bud. He was definitely not going to get out in that mud and walk for help, and, he was not about to sit there listening to a bus half full of children getting louder by the minute.

So, there we all sat in silence. If he was going to be miserable so were the rest of us. We wondered how long we were going to have to wait before someone missed us. My father was the first to appear. When we had not returned home at the time we normally did, my mother became concerned and sent him to look for us. He rescued my brothers and me from the bus and told the driver he would send for a tow truck and let the other families know where their children were.

The next driver we had was still driving the bus when I finished high school. The most vivid memory I have of him were his eyes. They were the bluest eyes I have ever seen. I guess he wanted to keep the upper hand and he certainly did. He would look up into the mirror over the driver’s seat and give us a cold hard stare that would stop us dead in our tracks. It was those ghostly blue eyes we feared the most.

It was not unusual for him to take someone to the principal’s office for getting out of line on the bus. By getting out of line, I mean putting up a window without permission, or changing seats while the bus was moving, or speaking loudly. He kept order on his bus.

One Sunday morning we were sitting in church and I saw him walk in. It was the Sunday the Masons visited. Years ago the Masons would visit each church in the county. They would all march into the sanctuary single file dressed in long black robes. As a child they looked frightening to me. That Sunday our bus driver was among them and he looked even more intimidating than ever in that long black robe.

It was not unusual for us to get on the bus and have to wipe chicken poop off the seats in the morning. When he parked the bus at his house, he sometimes forgot to shut the door all the way and his chickens would get on the bus and roost on the seats. Occasionally, they would lay eggs. I remember several times we would be coming to a stop and we would see an egg rolling up the aisle.

here was one boy who was a bully on our bus. Looking back, I now see why he was the way he was. Though, at the time all I saw was a guy trying to be tough. He was more “outgoing” than we were. He smoked, chewed, cussed and would give a passerby the finger in a heart beat.

He became so unruly that our driver made him sit at the front of the bus by the door. To keep him busy he made him the flag boy. He had to get out at each stop and hold a red flag across the road so the children could cross safely. Sometimes, he would poke the kids in the behind with the flag pole if he thought they were dragging their feet.

He liked to pick on kids. Once he turned around in his seat and was picking on my brother, Tonny. Our bus driver looked up in the mirror and thought they were fighting. He pulled the bus over and told them if they were going to fight they had to get off the bus and finish it. My brother was not fighting and did not want to fight…. especially him. He was big and all muscle from working every day after school.

When the driver told them to get off the bus and finish the fight that made the bully’s day. He literally pulled my brother out of his seat, down the aisle and off the bus. He pounded him good. Tonny did not have a chance. Some girls on the bus were crying. All the boys on the bus were plastered to the windows and hollering for Tonny to get up and throw a punch.

I think it dawned on the bus driver he had made a terrible mistake, but he was not about to admit it. When the boy tired of pounding on my brother he pulled him up and back onto the bus. The driver cranked the bus and off we went on our way home.

Weeks later he was picking on another little boy when Tonny told him to turn around and leave the kid alone. He quickly turned his attention toward my brother and said, “Whatcha’ gonna do ‘bout it?”

He had hardly gotten the words out of his mouth when Tonny came across with a right hook and landed it squarely on his nose. The boy’s face turned red and he began to cry. He was boo-hooing and blubbering. Everyone was laughing at the big guy. I am certain the driver saw it all, but it was like a referee who had made a bad call in a game and turned and looked the other way to make up for it. Our bus driver never acknowledged he saw a thing.

The odd thing was, after that he became my brother’s friend. He never bothered him again and when he started to pick on someone all Tonny had to say was, “I don’t think I would do that.” And he would settle down.

As it turned out he was not that bad of kid. We had not understood, that being tough was just his way of getting attention. Unfortunately, he didn’t finish school. He was held back so many times I guess he just gave up.

After he left school he joined the Army. Once he came back to high school and he was wearing his uniform. He was very proud of it and he looked better than I ever remembered seeing him. He got his G.E.D while in the service and he was going to make it a career. I remember when he told me, I was happy for him. He had found something he loved.

One day while off duty he was playing ball with his buddies. He was the catcher and the guy up at the plate was using a steel pipe for a bat. The batter hit the ball and as he was coming down with the pipe to let it go and run to first he hit the catcher in the knee. His knee was shattered. So was his career in the Army. He was discharged and sent home.

He did the only thing he knew to do when he returned home. He helped local farmers out and hauled pulp wood. Not long after he was back he became ill. His doctor told him to stay home and rest, but he had no choice, but to work and he finally worked himself down. I heard they found him lying on his couch at home. He died far too young.

Over the years, I have often reflected on this and I wondered what he would have accomplished if his knee had not been injured. Instead he died a young man. His body just gave out.

There were others on the bus that I remember fondly, Mary Ann Metts… and her sisters, Martha Jane and Margaret Ellen. They told their parents they wanted a baby brother for Christmas one year. We all laughed. Then their brother, Jimmy, came along. I guess it does not hurt to ask.

I had a big crush on Mary Ann. She was a year younger than me and I was just a neighbor boy who rode the bus with her. Surely, she must have known I was crazy about her. When we were teenagers she was going steady with a guy in her class and I kept thinking they would break up. Then I could ask her out. But, that never happened. I finished high school and went off to college.

When I returned home for Christmas during my second year of college I learned Mary Ann was getting married. She was engaged to someone other than whom she dated in high school. Our family was invited to the wedding and I remember sitting there during the wedding ceremony thinking, “This was not supposed to happen. I never got to ask her out on a date! I was robbed!” The truth is… I was so shy I probably would never have gotten up the courage to ask her out anyway. God had other plans for me and I moved on.

Judy Mitchell, her younger brother Mike and her sister Jan rode the bus with us, too. She was also a year younger than I. Judy seemed to have ambitions that far exceeded ours. She wanted to grow up to become a senator or a president or someone important. I believed if anyone could, she would one day.

In the brief time I was a member of the 4-H Club we took a field trip to the Jackson City Zoo. Judy was there. She and a couple more girls were throwing cookies into the cage where the gorilla was. We were all watching as the gorilla picked them up and put them in his mouth one by one. Suddenly, the beast started running around in circles and began to scream. All at once he ran toward us, jumped upon the bars and spit the cookies all over the girls. Then it was their turn to run and scream.

I attended Judy’s wedding, too. She married a young man from New York. It was an outdoor wedding at her parents’ home. It was beautiful. The thing I remember most was that the Rabbi wore the most unusual sport coat and tie I had ever seen at a wedding. He flew down from New York and had a most distinct accent. It was definitely not a wedding like we were accustomed to in our little community.

There was another friend of mine that rode our bus. A few years after we had graduated from high school we were at a dance at the local Community House in town and I stayed out late until the dance was over.

I was on my way home after the dance in my 1971 Ford Pinto. It was a terrible little car that had a fly swatter for an antenna. My buddy passed me in his Mustang. As he passed me he paused for a moment and waved, then proceeded to go around me on his way home. The road to his house was about a mile closer to town than where I lived.

I got home and slipped into the house as quietly as I could. I hated waking my parents up as much as they hated being awakened. I was in the kitchen getting a snack before going to bed when I noticed a car coming up our driveway. When it stopped someone got out, came to the front porch door and knocked. I could not imagine who would be coming to the door that time of night.

When I went to the door, I discovered it was a state trooper. We spoke and he asked if I had just come from town. I told him that I had. Then he told me he was going to have to give me a ticket. I was shocked. I could not remember speeding or doing anything wrong. I asked, “What am I going to get a ticket for?”

“Drag racing.”

“Drag racing! Surely, you aren’t serious.”

He was. About that time my father who had awakened walked out on the porch and wanted to know what was going on. The trooper proceeded to tell him he met me and my friend coming from town and we were drag racing.

My father and I said at the exact same time, “Drag racing with a Pinto?!!”

“Yes sir, he was drag racing in a Pinto.”

He proceeded to explain that he was going toward town when he saw us coming toward him drag racing. He got our tag numbers, turned around and managed to follow my buddy to his home. My buddy told him the same thing. He was not drag racing. When he asked where he had been and who was in the Ford Pinto, he explained he had been to a dance and he had passed me on the way home. But, he was not drag racing.

That is how he ended up at my house. My father spoke up. He said, “Let me get this straight. Both boys were coming at you this late at night drag racing. You got their tag numbers and followed the other boy home… that was in front of my son. Both deny drag racing. Have I got that right?”

“Yes, sir, that is correct.”

“How did you manage to get their tag numbers as dark as it is when you were going in one direction and they were going in another direction?”

He could not explain it.

“Have you ever seen anyone drag racing with a four cylinder Pinto before?”

He had not. My father said none of this was making sense. He said he would have to believe his son’s version over his on this incident.

The trooper made out the ticket and handed it to me. My father looked at the trooper and said, “You know this won’t stand up in court, don’t you?” He told us to do what we had to do.

We did. The next day we went to visit the Justice of the Peace. My father and I explained what had happened and he said, “NO ONE DRAG RACES IN A PINTO!” He tore up the ticket and said have a very nice day.

My friend had his ticket thrown out as well. After that we were very careful not to get caught doing anything out of the ordinary. We knew we were being watched.

One of the prettiest girls that rode our bus was Janet Young. She lived in a big white house near Lake Tiak-O’khata. Janet was in my grade and I loved it when she rode the bus. She lived close to town and her mother would often drive her to school. All the guys on the bus prayed that her mom’s car would break down. It was poetry in motion when Janet walked onto the bus. I am sure she knew she was pretty, but it never went to her head.

Two more friends who rode the bus were Ronnie Mitchell and Charles Jones. They were my age and we often rode our bikes to each others homes. We rode horses, built forts in our barn and had corn cob wars. There were times we played Superman and jumped from the barn loft while fleeing chicken snakes.

We formed a club in an old building on the Mitchell farm. It was the SKULL CLUB. I think the main thing our club did was to try and keep wasps out of the building. We often rode our bikes throughout the community exploring along the creeks and in the old barns.

One Saturday Charles, Ronnie, Ronald and I were playing in the church where Charles’ father was the pastor and Charles’ collie dog, Frisky, was in there, too. Charles was playing the Boogie-Woogie on the piano and his dog was howling with the music. Charles was pretty good on the piano no matter what his dog thought.

One night we camped out in Charles’ backyard. His house was across the road from the church cemetery and the moon was full that night. As we sat there looking across the road at the cemetery it appeared someone was walking among the graves. We were scared and did not know what to do. We were not about to go in the house and let his parents know we were afraid. That would not have been “cool”.

My fear increased when Charles told us he thought he saw a man standing out there with one arm up in the air. That was when Ronnie said ole’ so and so was buried in about that same spot. It was a man who had burned up in a house fire between our homes and town. They had said he died with his arm raised up over his head and the undertaker could not get it down. There was a rumor they had to bury him with his arm sticking up over his head. I think Charles and Ronnie had that story planned. It worked and I was almost ready to run home.

Time has a way of sending people in different directions as they grow older. We were no different. Charles’ father was called to another church and our little band of bike riders was soon history.

There was family of girls who lived near town. The youngest one was a pretty red head. Near their house lived two boys. On our way home one day the youngest boy reached into the red headed girl’s purse and took out her lipstick. He put it on and said it was as close as he was ever going to get to a kiss from her, so he would take it. The bright red lipstick was not as attractive on him as it was on her.

Then there were the children that lived at the trailer park near the lake. They moved in and out so often it was hard to keep up with all of them. We never knew who was going to get on the bus at that stop. Little did I know that one day my future wife would live there.

One memory that comes to mind is the morning Tonny’s mare, Half-Pint, had her colt. Most mornings we rose about 6 a.m. and got ready for school. While we ate breakfast Mother would stand at the kitchen window and watch for the bus across the field. When it turned down Shiloh Road to pick up the Metts and the Lee children we knew we had about five minutes before it came back to pick us up. We had it down to a science.

The morning the colt was born was in early spring. Mother woke us earlier than normal and we ate our breakfast as fast as we could. Then we ran across the road to the old cotton gin where the mare had her new colt. Half-Pint was a Pinto and Tonny loved her. That morning she had a beautiful spotted colt. Terry, Tonny and I were taking in the sight of the new colt trying out its new legs when the bus turned down Shiloh Road. We knew we had to hurry back across the pasture, get through the gate and down to the road before the bus made it to our driveway.

They were older and faster than I was. I was trying to keep up with them when I slipped and fell into a big pile of cow manure. It was bad… real bad. I tried rubbing in the grass to get as much as I could off, but it only smeared. I knew if I missed the bus I would be in big trouble. So, I did what any good country boy would do. I ignored it. I was hoping nobody would notice.

I grabbed my books by the road and jumped on the bus. They noticed. When I arrived at school I was sent to the bathroom and had to scrub cow manure off with a wet rag before they would let me in class. I am sure it smelled awful to the city kids. But, I did not miss the bus and that was the important thing!

I wish I could remember all the kids who rode the bus with me, but time has a way of fading and erasing names that I will never remember again.

However, there are some memories that will never fade. Dust drifting in the windows while traveling down the dirt roads, the smell of puke when a child gets motion sickness on a warm day, the eggs rolling down the aisle… some of which were picked up and tossed at passing cars.

Now it is forty years later. In some ways it seems like forty years, then again it seems like yesterday. My children are grown now, but I remember when they started to school and the big yellow bus would stop and pick them up. When they returned home they had learned a new song. It was a song about the school bus going through the town and the wheels on the bus going ‘round and ‘round.

Well, those wheels do go ‘round and ‘round. They go through towns and counties, down paved roads, dirt roads and dead end roads. They even travel through time and memories… very good memories.

Est via longa, longa, curvandum humus. (It’s a long, long, winding dirt road.)

IT’S ALL RELATIVE

I suppose everyone thinks they have interesting people in their family. I am no different. Thankfully, I loved to watch and listen as stories about our relatives were being shared in years past. In some instances I witnessed history being made first hand. In this chapter I would like to share a few of those interesting events. Remember… everything is relative.

JESSIE BROWN McGEE AND THE GORILLA

Jessie McGee was my great-great-grandfather on my Grandmother Algood’s side of the family. Jessie was a blacksmith and a wheelwright. They say he was a very quiet man and decisive in all he did. It was Jessie’s line of our family that came to America from Ireland during the potato famine. Jessie had a very dry wit and people who did not get to know him thought he lacked a sense of humor. Just the opposite was true.

He lived in the north part of Winston County on the Choctaw County line. A new head master came to the area to be in charge of the school and lived close by. The fellow was a know it all and often rubbed Jessie the wrong way, but Jessie never said anything… He just bided his time for an opportunity to put him in his place.

Jessie liked to fish. He set out trot lines and nets in a creek near his home. Someone was going around and robbing the fish off his lines and Jessie wanted it to stop. He casually started a rumor that there was a wild gorilla in the area that was attacking people and it appeared the beast was headed in the direction of their little community. He was hoping it would deter whoever was going out into the woods and stealing his fish.

The teacher stopped by his blacksmith shop one day and was talking about the rumor. He informed Jessie that it was preposterous. Gorillas did not live in the Americas. They could not survive in that part of the world. It had to be a vicious lie someone started.

Jessie looked at him and shook his head. “No, it is true. I have heard him out in the woods near the creek. Yesterday, I caught a glimpse of him going through the timber.”

The teacher was defiant. There could be no gorillas in the area. He had to be mistaken.

Jessie told him he was going to check his trot lines later that evening and invited him to come along and see for himself. The teacher accepted the invitation.

Jessie looked over at the man who helped him around the shop and winked. After the teacher left Jessie and his helper developed a plan. Jessie would take the teacher down to the beaver dam where the trot lines were set late that evening. He would carry his double barrel shot gun and have it loaded with dummy shells. His helper would get out in the woods and scream and make awful noises. He would take his shirt off and wade up the creek to where Jessie and the teacher were retrieving the fish and Jessie would shoot the fake shells at him. Then he would scream and run into the darkness of the woods.

That afternoon the teacher came as expected. He and Jessie made their way to the beaver dam near the creek. It was late and they had a lantern with them. They pulled in the trot lines and were collecting the day’s catch when out in the woods came a horrible noise.

The teacher looked out in the direction of the sound and said, “I hear something, but I don’t think it is a gorilla.”

Then the helper started whooping and hollering and shaking small trees. The teacher started to get a little nervous. Jessie told him to hold the lantern up high so they could get a better look.

At that point the man was wading up the creek toward them. He was hitting the water, splashing and screaming. The teacher started yelling at Jessie to shoot his gun before the thing came and attacked them.

Just before the man was close enough to be recognized as a person the teacher screamed, “SHOOT IT... SHOOT IT, NOW!”

Jessie fired off a shot. KAAAAA BOOOOOM. The “gorilla” turned and disappeared into the woods. The teacher ran in the opposite direction back to Jessie’s place, leaving Jessie out in the woods alone in the dark.

By the time Jessie made it back home the teacher had told everyone that it was true. There was a gorilla out in those woods. It had been an awful experience. It was screaming and yelling and thrashing in the water and was coming at them when Jessie shot at it and drove it back into the woods.

Everyone was astounded. He was a reputable man, so it had to be true. Jessie and the hired hand made it back home about the same time. When the teacher saw them together he figured it out. He had been duped. But, he said nothing until the next day when he stopped by Jessie’s shop.

He told Jessie, “You got me. You got me good, didn’t you?”

Jessie just smiled and said, “Why don’t we just keep this our little secret. No one has to know, but me, you and my helper. You know you would look pretty foolish if word got out. And whoever has been stealing my fish would come back and start stealing them again. This way we both win. You save face and I have a good witness that there is a gorilla in the woods.”

The teacher agreed and the imaginary gorilla remained in the woods for years after that.

The story about my great-great grandfather McGee has, also, been recorded in A HISTORY OF WINSTON COUNTY by Jennie Newsom Hoffman for the Federal Writer’s Project, Works Progress Administration in 1938. In 1955, the Winston County Library Board had the manuscript typed and it was republished by Taunton Publishers of Winston County.

LOUIS McCRAY ALGOOD AND CORRIE CLARK BENNETT ALGOOD

Corrie Clark Bennett Algood was my grandmother. She was born January 22, 1893 and lived almost a hundred years. She died October 14, 1992. She was an amazing lady. She only seemed old the last few months of her life. I always thought she was a young girl trapped in an old body. There are so many stories I could tell about her. I wish I could remember half of what she told me.

She met my grandfather, Louis Algood, at a church social. I suppose that is how a lot of people met back then. There were no phones or cars or planes… not even electricity. People gathered at churches in the community for revivals and dinner on the grounds.

My father once told me about going to a church social one summer when he was younger. They had dinner on the grounds after the noon service. Later that afternoon before the evening service they had a watermelon cutting.

Everyone had eaten their fill and it was time for the service. He said they went inside and took their seats. The pews back then were a little rustic. They were homemade with the seat being a wide board and the backs having open slats to lean against. Some of the boards on the seats had “cupped” over the years.

They stood to sing a few hymns and he noticed a young girl in the pew in front of them remained seated. When he looked down again he saw a trail of “water” spreading down the pew in the cup of the board. Evidently, she had more watermelon than she could hold.

The “water” eventually ran the length of the board and trickled over the end of the pew into the aisle. Luckily, someone noticed and alerted the others before they finished singing or they would all have had a nasty surprise when they sat down. When the singing was over the entire row quietly exited the pew and found other seats.

I wish I had asked more details about how my grandparents met, but that is water under the bridge. The fact is they were attracted to each other and after courting for a while my grandfather proposed to her.

At the time they were courting my grandmother was teaching at Calvary Consolidated School. It was not far from where she had grown up. My father and Uncle Reuben eventually went to school there when they were of age.

Their Clark cousins also attended Calvary School. Wilma Clark told me the boys would throw 22 rifle cartridges into the old wood stove on their way out to recess and the bullets would heat up causing a loud “pop”.

She told one of her friends that her father had a big gun at home and it used big bullets. She said, “I’ll bet it will make a real loud pop.” Her friend talked her into bringing one of the bullets to school one day. Just before recess she handed it to him and he dropped it into the old wood stove on the way out of the building. About the time they reached the back of the room the bullet went off.

Not only did it make a big pop, it blew the stove apart. She said it was a wonder the school did not burn down that day. Even though the teacher tried to find out who put the large cartridge into the stove, no one ever told. Wilma said she and her friend kept that little secret for a long, long time.

Louis told Corrie that if he had a good cotton crop in the fall he hoped she would marry him. She told him she would.

My grandfather’s mother died when he and his brother, Fate, were very young. His father, Reuben, remarried and he and his new wife had another son, Marshall. Shortly after Marshall was born Reuben was killed when he was struck by a horse that reared up and hit him in the chest. The blow broke his ribs and one of them punctured his lungs.

Reuben’s new wife did not want to raise my grandfather and his brother, so they went to live with their uncle and aunt, Johnny and Mary Allgood Keene, near town. That was where he was living when he proposed to my grandmother.

Some may notice there is a difference in the spelling of our family name at this point in time. It has been said that our family name switched between one L and two L’s over the centuries. The last time our family line dropped one of the L’s was during my grand father’s generation. Supposedly, someone got educated and decided one L was enough.

I imagine Louis thought if he had a good cotton crop he would be able to get a place of his own and they could start their life together. Well, that year was not a good year for cotton. He had a terrible crop and he was really down when he told Corrie the news. He told her the cotton crop was bad, but he asked her if she would marry him anyway. She said she would. Some way or another they would make it.

They told their parents and borrowed a wagon to go to town in. They were going to see the preacher and get married. That was in 1914. On the way into town they met the preacher in his buggy coming out of town and they flagged him down. They told him they were on their way to his house to see if he would marry them.

The preacher told them he would, but he was in a hurry to get somewhere. The street was very muddy because it had been raining for days, so he told them to stand up in their wagon. He got out his bible as he stood up in his buggy. They were married right there in the middle of West Main Street standing in their wagon.

She told me that they turned the wagon around and went back to the Keene’s place and had a big supper with all their family. The Keenes had fixed up my grandfather’s room and that is where they stayed until my grandfather could get a place of his own.

Eventually, they moved into an old house on the Keene property. Grandmother said it was really rough, but it did have a fireplace. The boards on the floor were put down when the lumber was green and when they dried, they shrank. She said the cracks between the boards in the floor were so wide she could look down and see the dogs and chickens walking underneath the house. When she swept the floors she just moved the broom back and forth and the dust fell through the cracks to the ground below. Winter was awful. The fireplace pulled such a draft that it pulled the cold air up through the cracks and nearly froze them all!

Dionysius Clark Bennett and Alice McGee Bennett were my grandmother’s parents. When Dionysius was a young boy, Grierson’s Raiders were pushing through Mississippi trying to divert the Confederate Army toward the center of the state as Grant and his troops were sneaking in on Vicksburg. Grierson and his troops came so close to the Bennett Place that my great-grandfather ran out into the woods and hid there as they passed by. They were in such a rush they did not take time to look for anyone.

According to people in the area, they made it to the area where Lake Tiak-O’khata is located now and camped out in a corn field there. Thankfully, they did little destruction to the Louisville area because they were pushing hard to get to southern Mississippi.

There was a story I was told by my grandmother about an event that occurred about 1910 that involved my great-grandfather. There was a fellow who lived between their house and town who had a reputation for being difficult. He was mean to his hired hands and mean and selfish to his family. Late one evening, his little girl told him she was thirsty and asked if he would help her get a drink of water.

He took her out on the porch to draw up some water from the well. When the well bucket was pulled up he poured the contents into a pail that was kept on the porch. He decided to take the first drink. Something about the water did not taste right so he got a lantern and shined the light into the pail.

He found someone had put strychnine (rat poison) in the bottom of the pail. Luckily, he had been selfish and took the first sip or his daughter may have been poisoned.

Earlier that day he had gotten into an argument with some men that worked on his place and he immediately thought it was them who had tried to poison him. From what I understand it could have been anyone. The man was mean and argumentative with everyone and had many enemies.

He confronted the two men and accused them of trying to kill him. They escaped and ran to my great-grandfather’s place that was west of there. They told him what was going on and asked him to take them to the jail in town. They wanted to be locked up for their own protection and thought they might stand a better chance of defending themselves in front of a jury.

D. C. Bennett and another man hid them under some stuff in the back of his wagon. They were taking them to town when the neighbor and some of his friends overtook them. They beat them up, took the men from the wagon and lynched them on the side of the road.

When I was a child the old oak tree was still standing near Old Robinson Road where they lynched the men. It was referred to as “The Witch Tree” and it actually looked wicked. It was huge, gnarled, twisted and dying. Until I knew the story behind the witch tree, I would look at it when we drove by on the way to town and expect to see witches dancing beneath it.

After they lynched them, they threw their bodies into Tallehaga Creek where they remained for a long time.

Dionysius told all his children when they married he would give them each 40 acres and a mule as their wedding gift. My grandmother’s 40 acres was miles and miles out in the country. Louis told her there was no way he could live that far from town. He refused to accept it. Her sister Sally told her she would trade her 40 for my grandmother’s 40. Her husband, Johnny Clark, already had some land nearer to town. So, they traded.

My grandparents bought another 40 acres from Leon L. & Olive Boswell that joined grandmother’s property. There was a small house on it and they moved into it when my father and uncle were young.

It was better than the first home they lived in, but not by much. They said they could lie in bed and look up and see the rats and mice peering at them from the edge of the ceiling at night. They decided to tear the home down after a few years and build a “rat proof” house. They used some of the lumber from the old house in the construction of the new one.

While they were building the house they slept in the seed house. That was where they kept the seed from the cotton they had harvested the previous fall. They would take their cotton to the gin in town and get the seed to use for planting their crop the next spring. Grandmother said they had the wood stove set up outside under one of the oak trees. That is where she did her cooking. As well as I remember the new house was completed in the early 20s.

Across the road in front of their house was a large scope of woods that ran all the way to another road where their neighbors, Wilson and Hattie Clark, lived. In those woods were huge virgin pine trees. My grandfather decided he would clear the land to plant cotton. He cut the timber and used a broad axe to cut the logs into cross ties for the railroad.

He took most of that money and went to the H. E. Hunt Ford Dealership in Louisville where he gave $345.00 for a new car. My uncle told me it did not even have roll up windows. There were flaps where the windows were.

He had never driven an automobile before and the salesman took him outside and showed him how the shifter worked and how to use the pedals. My grandfather climbed in and away they went on their journey home. He was one of the first in our community to own an automobile.

When the great depression hit my grandfather kept what little money he had in The Home Bank. There was a run on the bank and they had to close their doors. He and many others lost all the money they had deposited there.

I wish I had known my grandfather. He had Melanoma and passed away 12 years before I was born. It started with a spot on his back and spread throughout his body. In May of 1940, at the age of 49, he died in the house he had built.

I have heard he was a very good man. He was quiet, decisive and fair.

After my grandfather’s death in 1940 my grandmother, my father and Uncle Reuben lived there until about the time of World War II. Reuben married and moved away. My father had promised my grandfather he would remain on the farm to take care of my grandmother.

When the war broke out, Daddy was drafted and sent to Europe to fight the Nazis. My uncle ended up fighting the Japanese in the Pacific.

Grandmother remained on the farm and she and my father would write letters to each other daily and she ran the farm through “Snail Mail”.

She told me once that she was a little scared to stay there by herself until one day when her confidence was secured. She had asked a man on the farm to catch one of the hens because she wanted to cook it for dinner. The man came back and told her he could not catch that particular hen. She kept outrunning him.

My grandmother told him she would try to shoot it. She said she took a rifle and with one shot she hit the hen in the head. The man looked at her and just shook his head. “Miss Corrie, I sho’ didn’t know you could shoot like that.”

My grandmother never let on that it was a lucky shot. She said, “I just hate to waste bullets, what with the war going on and all.”

After my father returned from the war he married my mother and they all continued to live together in that house. My mother was not the easiest person to live with. My father once told me that mixing two women in one house was like mixing fire and gasoline. There was sure to be an explosion.

My grandmother wanted my father’s marriage to succeed and she made plans to do something else. She went to work at French Camp Academy as a dorm mother. That way she had a place to stay, she had meals and she made some money.

I did not know all this until I was much older. I grew up thinking the house was our home and when my grandmother came it was just to visit. I was aware she had a room in the back of the house, but I did not realize we were actually living in her house!

For a while she was a house mother at the Theta Xi Fraternity at Mississippi State University. She oversaw the kitchen and made certain the boys had plenty of good food. They all loved her. After she retired and moved back to Louisville members of the fraternity from as far away as Connecticut would phone her or drop by for a visit and a piece of pie. Her door was always open.

As time went by she changed jobs and went to work in an orphanage in Columbus, Mississippi. When I was younger we would go over to Palmer Home for Children in Columbus and visit her on Sunday afternoons.

She must have loved the children because they certainly loved her. She was a house mother and helped out with odd jobs around the orphanage. I can understand why she was loved so much. She was just fun to be around.

She had an old Singer Sewing Machine that operated with a foot pedal and she made us shirts and pajamas when we were younger. Once she made me a playmate that was the same size as me! He had a shirt, pants and shoes that were my size, too. I called him Sammy and I played with him a lot.

Once, I was feeling mischievous and put him under my father’s truck. Daddy got in the truck and started to go into town. I was hiding behind the chimney and I screamed out. When my father looked back he nearly died. He thought he had run over me. I got a pretty good spanking for that little prank.

When she was 75 years old she decided to retire and move back to Louisville. My father was upset that she did not move back into the farm house. She told him she would rather have a place of her own in town. As I stated before, my mother was not the easiest person to get along with.

By that time she had given up driving. My father did not know how he would manage transportation for her since she was back and no longer driving. Over the years I remember her driving a ‘36 Chevrolet, a ‘48 Plymouth, and a ‘62 Rambler. Somewhere along the way she wisely decided she should not drive anymore. Her eyes were getting bad and it was no longer safe.

But, things worked out. She loved living in the little house on Park Street and she had wonderful neighbors, who looked after her. My great aunt, Era Bennett, drove her wherever she needed to go. The funny thing was… Aunt Era did not need to be out on the roads either, or so my father thought.

Grandmother’s knees gave her a lot of trouble and she eventually started using a walker to help her get around. She made a pouch for the front of the walker and that made it easier to carry things with her. One of her cousins thought she took too long to answer her phone, so he bought her a cordless phone to carry in her “walker pouch”. That made it very handy for her.

When she was in her 90s she often went for walks along Park Street. There happened to be an old cemetery across the street from her and she would walk over there to see the flowers.

It was called The Old Baptist Cemetery and it held a lot of Louisville’s early residents. Among them was my great-great-great-grandfather McGee who was buried in an unmarked grave. Also, Winston County’s first sheriff was buried there.

History records that Louisville’s version of Patrick Henry once hid in an above ground burial vault when Colonel Grierson and his raiders passed through during the Civil War. His slave lifted the top of vault while he crawled in and lay down. After the raiders moved on he came back and let him out.

One day she happened to be out in the cemetery looking at the flowers when a friend she had not heard from in a long time called her. She answered her cordless phone and her friend did not recognize her voice. My grandmother knew immediately who the caller was.

Her friend asked, “Is Corrie home?”

My grandmother (always the joker) answered solemnly, “No, I am afraid she is out in the cemetery.”

Her friend was overcome. She said, “Oh my, I am soooo sorry. I did not know she had passed away!” To which Grandmother replied, “Don’t worry, she is just visiting!”

Grandmother got a big laugh out of that one.

Another time she was going to her friend’s house two doors down the street from her home and was at the front steps when her phone rang.

It happened to be that same friend she was going to see. She asked my grandmother if she had time to run over and see something she had been working on. My grandmother had another “moment”. She said, “Sure. I will get there as fast as I can.”

She stepped up on the porch and rang the door bell. When the lady came to the door my grandmother started panting as if she had been running. She said, “I got here as fast as I could! How did I do?”

Her friend was floored! She thought for a moment she had actually run over from her house.

That is the kind of “girl” my grandmother was. She was fun.

When my father was terminally ill she would come out to the farm to visit him. She was very upset about his illness and visited as often as she could. My father told me there was nothing more alarming than to be sleeping there peacefully and wake up to have an elderly woman sitting at the edge of the bed, leaning over to make sure he was still breathing.

He said, “If I knew it would not kill her, I would either hold my breath, or jump up and shout “BOO!”

He had a sense of humor, too.

One day I was visiting her and she was talking about the “old man” who mowed her yard. I had heard her make that comment before and I decided to ask her a question.

“Grandmother, how old is that old man?”

“He is about 70.”

I guess that was old to be pushing someone else’s yard. Still, it tickled me that the old man was younger than her by twenty years.

Another time we were sitting in her bedroom visiting and she paused and said, “You know something? There aren’t as many old people around like there used to be.”

I was thinking to myself, “No grandmother, there just aren’t many people older than you.”

When her health started failing my uncle had her come live with him in Tennessee. She hated leaving Louisville where all her friends were, but she knew it was for the best. It was getting to the point it was no longer safe for her to be alone.

When my grandmother was about 97 she came up to Kentucky to visit us for a few days. By that time she had given up housekeeping and was living with her son, Reuben, in Tennessee. They needed to go on a trip and we all thought it would be a good opportunity for her to visit us.

One day, Grandmother and my family had finished supper and we were still sitting at the table talking. Grandmother looked across the table at my youngest daughter and asked, “Carrie, what do you want to be when you get older?”

Carrie thought a moment and replied, “I am going to be a ballerina when I grow up. I am going to twirl and dance on my toes!”

Grandmother smiled and said, “Well, that is very nice, Carrie, I’ll bet you will do very well at it.”

Then she turned to Becky and asked her the same question. Becky told her when she was older she was going to be a nurse. She was going to give people shots and make them feel better. Grandmother thought that was a fine thing to do.

Then she looked over at Amy and asked her, “Amy what are you going to be when you get older?”

Amy did not hesitate. She said, “Great-Grand Mommy, I am going to be a lawyer. They make a lot of money.”

Grandmother thought a moment and replied, “Well, I hope you do real well, young lady.”

Amy was trying to be polite and asked her, “Great-Grand Mommy, what are you going to be when you get older?”

Grandmother, always was a quick witted person, said, “DEAD!” Then she started to laugh.

Amy’s jaw dropped and started to quiver. She started crying and we all had to regain our composure, stop laughing and get her to realize it was just a joke.

She out lived my grandfather by 50 plus years. A few months prior to her 100th birthday my uncle called and told me she had passed away. She had a long wonderful life.

I had hoped she would make it to 100. Her mother lived to be 95. Her sister, Sally, vowed to out live her mother and she passed away when she was 96. Grandmother told me she was shooting for 100. She almost made it.

Not many days go by that I don’t remember something about her. Her wonderful spirit was contagious. I wish I could remember everything she told me and everything I saw her do. She was a walking inspiration. I only wish I had gotten to know my grandfather as well. If they were anything alike it would have been fun to see them together.

After Mother passed away my brothers and I decided to divide up the farm. I ended up with part of the original 40 acres that my great-grandparents had given to my grandmother as a wedding gift. Letting go of the farm was one of the most difficult things I have ever done. The original 40 acres had been in our family since the late 1800s. The barn my grandfather, uncle and father built had been on that piece of property, as well as an old cotton gin my father purchased when he returned from World War II.

I grew up with a wonderful family and I loved the farm. When my grandfather had that bad cotton crop in 1914 my grandmother could have said no to his proposal. I am glad she did not.

REUBEN AND ALICE ALGOOD

Uncle Reuben was my father’s only sibling. When I was young there was seldom time for visits as my uncle was in the Army and was stationed in various places around the world.

Occasionally, when he was in the states he and Aunt Alice would come for short visits to the farm. I always enjoyed listening to their stories of far away places, like Japan and Turkey. They never failed to bring us something from some exotic place.

Once they brought us a set of scales from Turkey. My mother proudly placed them in the center of our dining table and had artificial grapes dangling from the weight plates.

I remember two things they brought me. One was a silk jacket from Japan with an embroidered dragon on the back. It was blue and the dragon was red and yellow. I wore it until I could no longer fit into it. The other thing they brought me was a fly fishing pole that came in a wooden carrying case. I wore it out fishing in the pond behind our home.

Once while visiting us Uncle Reuben caught the biggest fish I had ever seen from that little pond. It was a six pound bass. I could not believe it. All I ever caught from that pond were small bream and sun fish.

One of our very rare trips away from the farm was to visit them at their home in Tennessee after Uncle Reuben retired from the Army. They bought a large old home on a farm out in the country, not far from Columbia, Tennessee. They had worked hard to restore it and had it furnished with beautiful antiques. He had a small tobacco patch and I was amazed to see real tobacco plants instead of the ground up brown leaves that came out of a Prince Albert can.

There was a cemetery across the road from their house that was surrounded by large old cedar trees. It was a very old cemetery and my cousins, Pat and Becky took us over there to explore. I thought it was a little spooky, but it was a lot of fun playing hide and seek among the tombstones.

Aunt Alice was a genealogist and has done extensive research on our family history. She always fascinated me with her recall of names, places and dates. As I grew older I became more and more amazed with all the information she had collected over the years.

She was always active in politics and once she ran for the Senate. Uncle Reuben said she did very well, but her downfall was not being a member of the Church of Christ. Most of the people in that area were Church of Christ, and not being of that denomination may have hurt her chances for winning the election.

She became active in the historical associations in that area of Tennessee. She and Uncle Reuben helped preserve several old homes in Murray County. One, The Athenaeum, was next door to their home in Columbia. That was where they moved after a fire destroyed their home in the country. Aunt Alice was involved with many publications and has authored and co-authored books on history and genealogy.

There was an old carriage house by the Athenaeum and they found a box of Confederate money when they were preparing the place for restoration. On one of my visits to Columbia they gave me one of the old Confederate bills.

I regretted that we did not live closer and we were not able to spend more time together. Their work with historical preservation and documenting our family history has been one of the main influences in getting me to record my stories about growing up in Mississippi. Hopefully, my descendants will enjoy reading about where some of their family originated.

YANK

My father was drafted into service during World War II. His older brother, Reuben, had already enlisted and was serving in the army’s Pacific Theatre. At the time my father was called up he was farming the home place in Winston County. He asked for a postponement until he could finish gathering his crops and the military consented. It was unusual for the military to take all the sons in a family and send them off to war, but those were extraordinary times. He tried to get them to let him stay on the farm because there was no one else to operate it and he was the sole provider for his widowed mother. All the appeals were turned down and he eventually left for basic training.

He was a look-out gunner on a Sherman Tank in General Patton’s Third Army. History records what all they had to go through and how hard they pushed from Normandy all the way to Germany. Along the way he encountered many things that he would never talk about. I know he liberated concentration camps. I found some of the old photos he managed to send back home. He saw a lot of bad things he did not want to remember.

Somewhere along the way he found a small dog. The dog was a naturally bob-tailed breed. He was very hungry, so my father fed him and took care of him. The dog knew he had it good with my father so he stayed. Daddy gave him the name “Yank”. It was amazing how much Yank hated Germans. At one time he must have had an awful encounter with them, because he definitely could tell the difference between Germans and Americans.

Whenever Germans were near he would growl and bark. My father finally decided it was their clothes and boots. The boots had a different type of sole on them and when the Germans walked their boots made a different sound than the American boots. After he returned home my father was showing Uncle Reuben a pair of German boots he had sent back home. Reuben tried them on and was walking down the hall when he was attacked by the little dog. Yank thought a German was in the house!

There were several occasions where Yank saved my father and his buddies from being taken by Germans due to his ability to detect the enemy. Once, while they were bunked down in an old building, Yank jumped up from a sound sleep, started running in circles before diving under a bed. The guys all looked at each other then they scrambled up and took cover. Seconds later a bomb came down and blew up just outside their building.

He was, also, a good provider. My father and the men in his tank grew tired of the rations they were provided. When they came to a populated area Daddy would tell Yank to go find a chicken or goose. He would run off and come back later with the requested meal. That turned into a problem later when he made it back to the States, but it kept them fed while moving throughout Europe.

Daddy almost lost Yank once. They were moving by box cars across Europe and Yank had gone off to visit a lady friend. It was time for the train to pull out and my father was frantically looking for him. The train started moving and my father had to hop into the box car. The train was picking up speed when he saw a little speck down the tracks running toward him. It was Yank. My father jumped off the train and started calling for him to run, run, run! Remember he was a small dog and he was giving it all he had. My father was running too, trying to keep up with his boxcar. Yank finally made it to my father who grabbed him up and threw him into the car. Then some guys reached down and pulled Daddy into the car, too. That was one of the closest calls he had with Yank.

The little dog stayed with him throughout the war and traveled across Europe fighting the Germans. When Germany surrendered and the troops were being positioned to be sent back home, my father did not want to leave him behind. He asked permission to take Yank on board the ship to bring him home with him. He explained that the dog had been with him all throughout the war and deserved to become an official American.

The man in charge of loading the ship told him he could not allow him to bring the dog on board. If he was caught on board within 12 miles of land he would be thrown overboard. However, if he did manage to get him on the ship and Yank made it out to sea he could have the run of the ship as long as he behaved.

When the day came to board the ship my father cut a small hole in his duffel bag. It was a hole just big enough that Yank’s nose could fit through. He put Yank in the duffel bag and threw it over his shoulder. He patted the bag and told Yank to be very quiet if he wanted to become an American citizen.

As my father boarded the ship he walked passed the man he had spoken to about bringing Yank on board. They exchanged glances and my father looked at him and smiled while patting the duffel bag. The guy smiled and nodded as my father walked by.

When they were out to sea Yank had the run of the ship and made several friends on board the ship. Upon disembarking the ship in New York I am told a photographer for a major magazine saw my father bringing Yank off the ship and snapped a photo. He asked my father who he was carrying and my father replied, “A fellow soldier.”

Yank made it all the way to Camp Shelby Mississippi where my father was discharged from service. At Hattiesburg my father was to catch a bus for his final leg home to Winston County. As he started to board the bus the driver stopped him and told him no dogs were allowed on his bus. My father explained who Yank was and how he made it all the way to the USA, but the driver did not care. He would not let him on the bus. My father told him if Yank could not ride, he would not ride either. The people on the bus all yelled at the driver. I would have hated to have been him on that trip.

Walter Bennett, Deedie Metts, his mother, Corrie Algood and his girlfriend, Rochelle Foster, traveled to Hattiesburg and brought my father and his little dog home.

Yank made it to the farm in Winston County and became an American citizen. However, the first thing he did when he got out of the car was run and catch a chicken which he brought to my father. Daddy did not have the heart to whip him. Yank thought it was time to eat. Daddy’s first task was to build a chicken pen to keep them safe.

Yank lived a short while on the farm. A few months after he was there he got into a fight with a larger dog and my father found him lying near a fence. It was sad to think the little dog that helped my father fight and survive the war, traveled thousands of miles to a new home and ended up dying in a dog fight.

However, there were reports of naturally bob-tailed dogs cropping up in new litters of pups throughout the community after that.

MY FATHER’S WORLD WAR II LETTERS AND STORIES

When my father was in World War II he wrote letters back almost daily to his mother. I still have most of those letters and it has been interesting reading them because they tell what he was thinking and experiencing between 1943 and 1945.

Some of the letters are V-Mail copies of the originals that he wrote. I guess the army “shrank” the original letters to save space on the airplanes. Other letters are regular mail and airmail. I am sure I do not have all the letters, but enough survived to fill in a lot of gaps.

There were hidden clues in some of the letters to my grandmother that let her know if he was in a dangerous area. Some tell of the weather conditions, which let her know approximately what country he was going through. In some of the letters he indicated if he was sleeping on “hay” or in a tent. Those letters told her whether or not he was able to take shelter in a barn or building or if he was on the move and out in the open.

Never did he mention the actual war. That was probably forbidden. He would mention if he was eating rations or if he had eaten a good meal. That, too, was an indication of either being in combat or in a situation where they had time to set up the mess tents. In some letters, he mentioned that he had received boxes of food or clothing from home. And in other letters he let her know he was sending packages home so she could watch for them.

The first postmark I found was from Junction City, Kansas, dated February 11, 1944. He was located near West Point Military School. The next letter indicated he was at Fort Riley, Kansas.

In May of 1944, the postmarks were from Camp Gordon in Augusta, Georgia. Then in June of ‘44 he was sending letters from New York, an indication he was being shipped over seas.

He once wrote that he landed at Normandy, France. I know he had a brief stay in England before going to France. The first postmark I found of him being in France was August 20, 1944. In that letter he indicated that he had received 17 letters the day before, so he must have been in combat for several days prior to that.

The last letter postmarked in France was December 16, 1944. The next letter was post- marked December 24, Germany. In it he indicates he had been in Germany for a while and was sleeping in houses with civilians. He was looking forward to a hot bath.

In May of 1945, the postmark changed to Austria. And in September of that year the postmark indicated that he was back in the States at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

He was in Patton’s 3rd Army and was a lookout gunner on a Sherman tank. He actually landed on Normandy Beach July 6, 1944 even though the postmarks on the letters do not correspond due to slow mailing. They attacked the German left flank at Normandy and in August of `44 they were moving 40-50 miles a day across France. They went through Metz and hit La Range.

It was the worst winter in 38 years and the third army was so fast they out ran their supply line. On December 16, 1944 they were attacked by the Germans. It was there both of his ear drums burst from shells exploding around his tank. They were at the Battle of the Bulge, the Ardennes Mountains and in Belgium.

The day after Christmas he was in the Battle of Bastogne. They crossed the Rhine River and moved to the Aire, then on to Burgermister to liberate a concentration camp.

Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945. After the war, he returned home with his dog, Yank, and resumed farming in Winston County just west of Louisville. On December 4, 1945 he married my mother, Rochelle Foster, in a double wedding ceremony with his cousin, Otera Bennett and her fiancé, Nowell Haggard, at First Methodist Church’s parsonage in Louisville. His brother, Reuben, was the only witness for both couples!

As he was leaving the parsonage to begin his honeymoon my Uncle Reuben asked how long they would be gone. My father told him he had just wound the old clock in the living room at home and when the weights of the clock were getting even with the bottom of the pendulum he would walk back in the front door.

My parents and the Haggards decided to go on their honeymoon together. At the time Nowell did not own a car and they thought it would be an adventure to travel together. They made it to New Orleans and it was there both couples decided to go separate ways. Nowell found a car he liked there and bought it.

When my father returned home with his new bride they were traveling alone. As he walked into the house everyone glanced over at the old grandmother clock. The weights had just reached the pendulum and it was time to wind the clock again. My father was right on time.

Uncle Reuben told me several stories my father passed on to him immediately after returning home. He said he stayed up late talking to his brother and my father told him he would talk about it that night, but after that he did not want to dwell on it anymore.

One day my father’s tank was sent beyond the front lines to scout for the enemies. They had traveled many miles and came upon a hedge row. Beyond the hedge row, Germans were on the move. They were upon them before they realized it. Immediately, they turned the tank around to retreat back to their outfit and when they did the track came off one side of the tank.

That was nearly a fatal mistake. They radioed back to get help putting the track back on, but were told it was too late in the day and they would have to hunker down for the night and make it the best they could. Darkness fell and they drew straws for guard duty. My father drew first and last watch.

After his first watch, he got back in the tank and settled in for the night until his next watch. He said when he woke up sunlight was coming through a seam in the tank and hitting him in the eyes. He knew he had overslept and wondered what had happened to his buddy that was on guard. Somehow, he was able to peer outside and saw five Germans approaching the tank with their guns drawn and pointed at them.

He did the only thing he knew to do. He yelled out “Halt! Throw down your weapons!”

Surprisingly, they obeyed.

When he yelled out it woke his buddy who was on the opposite side of the tank. He stood up and came around the tank to see five Germans with their hands in the air.

He held his gun on them until my father and the other soldiers climbed out of the tank and got their weapons.

The Germans were made to help put the track back on. After the track was on, they tied them up around the outside of the tank, and drove back to rejoin the outfit.

When they arrived back at their outfit, they were nearly court-martialed for bringing prisoners back with them. Their company was on the move and had no time for prisoners.

Another time my father’s tank became separated from its outfit and they were trying to catch up with them. According to the information they had received, their outfit was on the other side of a large hill. They decided to take a short cut over the hill and catch up. They made it up the hill and were going down the other side when the tank began to slide sideways. They were able to get control of it and caught up with their unit.

When they got back into formation the commanding officer asked them how they managed to catch up so quickly. They told him they took a short cut over the hill behind them. He informed them they could not have done that and wanted to know how they got there.

Again, they told him they had come over the hill and caught up with the outfit. It was then the commander looked down and began to shake his head. He told them they had to be the luckiest “S.O.B.s” on earth. They had just mined the entire hill so the Germans could not cross it and catch up with them. The hill was covered with mines!

Daddy did tell me a few stories, but none about combat. He said once they came to a town and took over a big house. There was a large footed bathtub in an upstairs room. However, there was no running water in the town.

They brought the tub downstairs and cut a hole in the floor where the drain was. Then they hauled water inside and heated it up for a bath. When they had finished bathing they pulled the plug and the water drained out into the basement.

There was a beautiful dining room in the house and they set it with fine linen, china and sterling silverware. They ate a huge meal and then the commander said it was time to do the dishes. The men all stood up and grabbed the table cloth in front of them. They marched it over to a large window and tossed the table cloth, dishes and all out the window.

Daddy said it was the quickest he had ever done dishes.

Once he said they came into a German town on a cold night. They had been fighting for days and had driven the German Army out of the area. They walked up to a house and ordered everyone to leave immediately. The occupants all grabbed their clothes and some belongings and fled the house.

My father said he found a bed and climbed in. The occupants had left so quickly the sheets were still warm!

Once he liberated a slave labor factory. When they opened the doors it was full of children the Germans had conscripted into service. He said most of the children were about 12 years old. They were very happy to be free.

People were carving up horses in the streets for food. It was bad. I am told he liberated a concentration camp. But, he never discussed it as far as I know. I have come across photos of mass graves with bodies piled inside. I don’t know if he took the photos or if he found them. There was a Rabbi at one end of the gravesite holding a service for those that filled the long trench.

When we were children we would play with swords and bayonets my father had sent back to the States. He sent a lot of things back home. Everyone who lived on our farm had good shoes and clothes that he mailed back. I remember wearing German hats in the winter when we went to feed the cattle and horses. We probably looked like little Nazis’ running around on the farm in Mississippi, but we were warm.

He sent back a Grandmother clock in five different boxes. The only part of the case that he was able to send back was the round oak top that held the clock face. When he returned home he had the bottom of the cabinet made from a cherry tree on the farm. It looked odd, but not bad. My oldest brother has the clock in his home.

There were boxes of pistols and guns he sent back, too. I wish I had been able to keep a few of them. I remember there was a wicker basket in my grandmother’s room that held a lot of foreign coins. When we were younger we would grab a hand full of coins and go down to the pond behind our house and skip them across the water.

I have often thought about that since I have gotten older. Some day, years from now, someone will be digging in that area and wonder how in the world all those foreign coins ended up in the middle of Mississippi.

If my father had lived longer I might have been able to get him to tell me more about the war and some of his experiences. But, I am afraid there are many historical events he saw and experienced that we will never know about.

As I mentioned before his eardrums burst during combat. For years he had difficulty hearing. In the mid 1960s a hearing-aid was developed that helped him. He went to the VA in New Orleans and was fitted with two hearing-aids.

One night soon after he received them we were sitting on the front porch and I noticed Daddy playing with them and trying to adjust the volume. Then he just sat there in a daze. He asked us, “Do you hear that?”

We had not noticed anything out of the ordinary and answered, “No.” We had not heard anything.

Then we noticed he was almost in tears. He said, “Whip-O-Wills! I can hear Whip-O-Wills! I have not heard those since before the war.”

We had taken the sounds around us for granted. There were things he was able to hear after that, that he had forgotten about in all those years after the war.

When he received the new hearing-aids he was told if anything ever happened to them he could send them back and they would repair or replace them. He took them at their word.

One day he was on a trip and had taken them out and set them in his lap while driving. He stopped for gas and when he got out the hearing-aids fell out on the concrete. He did not notice they were gone until he was back in the car and driving away.

He, quickly, stopped and went back to look for them. He found them. They were in a thousand pieces. He had run over them when he pulled out of the gas station. He raked all the little pieces up and put them in an envelope. He enclosed a letter stating that he had had a little accident and he was sorry. They mailed him a new pair a couple of weeks later.

After he passed away I found the following information among his papers. Army serial #. He was a Tec 5 and entered service October 28, 1943. He separated service October 21, 1945 at Fort Bragg. He was a private basic 521, private first class rifleman 745, Tec 5 Cannoneer 1736 and Tec 5 Assault Gunner 1736.

He was an assault gunner with the 3rd Calvary Reconnaissance Squadron (Mechanized). Fired a 75 MM Howitzer mounted on an M8 motor carriage, employing both direct and indirect fire support of armored car and light tank reconnaissance groups. He also fired in support of infantry… particularly during the crossing of the Mosselle River in France. My father was in combat during four major campaigns and had 269 days of continuous combat. He fought in the European Theater of Operations, Northern France, Rhineland, Ardennes and in central Europe. He received the following decorations: Eamet Campaign medal with four Bronze service stars, Good conduct medal GoII HQ 3 Cav RCN SQ 24 DEC 44.

Recently, I learned my father’s fellow crew members in the Sherman Tank were: Wayne E. Smith of Halstead, Kansas, Stan Johnson of Reading, Massachusetts, and James Jennings of Helena, Montana. After they departed service at Fort Bragg they were never able to reunite.

TERRY ALGOOD

My father loved guns. When he was in World War II he collected several and sent them back to his home in Winston County. I remember a wood box filled with all sorts of pistols he kept in a cabinet at home.

He did not keep any ammunition with those guns for reasons of safety. But, the double barrel shotgun that had belonged to his father and a bone handle 45 pistol he kept on his top closet shelf were always loaded.

Occasionally, we had varmints or thieves that would come around the house. If someone tried stealing equipment or gas during the night, he had a gun ready for protection.

When my oldest brother, Terry, was about three years old Mother sent him back to his room for a nap. He had gotten up several times and Mother was tired of him coming back into the kitchen. She knew he needed a nap or the rest of the day would not go well.

She sent him back to his room and told him she did not want to catch him getting off the bed again or she would have to spank him.

She was standing at the kitchen sink washing dishes when she heard little feet behind her. She turned around and there was Terry again. This time he was holding my father’s 45 automatic pistol in both hands and had it pointed at her.

He said, “If you don’t give me a drink of water, I am going to shoot you!”

She got him a drink of water and managed to get the gun away from him as he was taking the glass.

After that Daddy had to keep the guns unloaded and the shells in another location.

Terry is five years older than me. When we were younger, five years was a lot. I was little and very hyper. My brother played off of that and loved to push my buttons. I have always been a slow riser in the mornings. I have improved slightly since I have grown up, but when I was young… the best thing to do was give me my space in the mornings.

One morning we were sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast before catching the school bus. I was a little cranky and Terry continued to pick on me. I kept telling him to leave me alone, but he just kept it up. He should have known I was at the breaking point, but he missed all the signs.

Finally, I had all I could take. I took a kitchen table knife, stood up and threw it at him. Luckily for both of us he ducked. The table knife stuck up in the wall behind him in the area where his head would have been located.

After that he did not pick on me at breakfast anymore.

Yes, I did get a whipping. And there is still a spot in that wall where the knife stuck in it.

WALTER BENNETT AND THE NEW CHICKEN HOUSE

Walter Bennett was not just my great-uncle; he was like a grandfather to me, too. When I was young Uncle Walter and Aunt Ruby treated my brothers and me more like grandchildren than great-nephews. Uncle Walter’s first wife, Sammie Carter, passed away when his son, Harry, was very young.

Harry spent a lot of time at my father’s house when he was growing up and as a result our families were, so to say, blended. At one time Uncle Walter lived in our community, not far from my father’s home. Daddy told me about the time Uncle Walter built a new chicken house. He had trouble with possums and raccoons killing his chickens. So many were disappearing that he had to do something. He wasn’t so sure whether or not there may have been some two legged critters making off with a few of them, as well.

He decided to build a new chicken house and from the description my father gave me, it was a very nice one. It was well built and had good solid doors to keep out all the critters, whether they were two legged or four legged.

Daddy was a mischievous kid. He was not mean, but he did like to have fun. He wondered what Uncle Walter would do if he caught someone breaking into his new hen house.

I guess his curiosity got the best of him. One night he made a dummy from some old clothes and a hat. He took the dummy, some string and a chicken with him when he walked over to his uncle’s house. He placed the dummy outside the hen house door, tied one leg of the chicken to the dummy and tied the other string to the chicken’s free leg. Then he ran the string along the ground to a bush several yards away. That was where he hid.

The scene was set. Daddy made an awful noise that was loud enough to wake everyone in my uncle’s house. A few minutes later a lamp was lit and Daddy watched as the light made its way through the house and out to the back porch.

Uncle Walter was standing on the edge of the porch peering out through the darkness in the direction of the chicken house.

“Who’s there?” he called out.

My father yanked on the string attached to the chicken’s leg and the old hen began to cackle.

Uncle Walter hollered out for Aunt Ruby to get his shotgun, someone was trying to steal his chickens.

Daddy gave the string another yank and the hen squawked even louder.

By that time Uncle Walter was furious. He yelled out at the dummy to drop the chicken or he was going to shoot!

Again, Daddy yanked the string, and the hen squawked a little more. Uncle Walter handed the lamp to Aunt Ruby and told her to hold it up high so he could get a good look. Then he yelled out one more time, “Drop that chicken and run or I’m going to shoot!”

Another yank and the chicken gave it all she had.

KAAAAABOOOOOOOM! Uncle Walter had fired a warning shot, but the dummy didn’t move. By this time Daddy was scared. He was afraid his uncle might see him hiding in the bushes and shoot in his direction. Uncle Walter had one shot left.

Daddy could not resist. He pulled the string again.

This time he pulled it hard enough the chicken and the dummy both lurched forward and the chicken was going crazy.

When he heard the final shot he ran as fast as he could all the way home.

The next morning his uncle paid him a very early visit. After blowing a sizable hole in his new chicken house and killing several of his prized hens, he walked over and discovered the man was just a dummy! He knew he had been taken for a ride. He put two and two together and figured it had to be my father behind the little charade.

Daddy did not tell what took place after he was found out, but he did say it took Uncle Walter a long time to get over shooting his own chicken house.

I guess my father was in the “Dog House”.

AUNT RUBY VERSUS THE KLAN

My cousin Cathy Bennett Barnes shared this story with me about her grandmother. Many years ago Cathy’s younger brother, Wally, had a high fever one night. He was in his bedroom when he heard a commotion at the house next door. He pulled back the curtains and there were some men in white sheets burning a cross in their neighbor’s yard.

The men were talking and Wally recognized their voices. The house next door happened to belong to his grandmother, Ruby Bennett. Aunt Ruby built a new home on another lot after her husband had passed away. The older home was too big for her, so she rented it to a nice family who happened to be Jewish.

Wally went into the room his parents were in and asked his father why was so-and-so, so-and-so, and so-and-so were burning a cross in the neighbor’s front yard.

Harry was shocked. He was going to confront the men. As he was rushing through the house, he was loading his shotgun. All that could be heard was the “clickity click” of shells being chambered.

When he saw the men in the yard he was tempted to fire the gun, but he did not. He told them the people that lived there were good, decent people. They did not deserve such treatment. Furthermore, his mother needed to rent that house and the people were excellent tenants.

He made them collect their charred cross and clear out. That would seem like a good place for this story to end. But, that is not the end of the story.

Ruby Bennett found out what the men had done on her property and she had her own way of dealing with it.

The next Sunday evening before the preacher was to give his message he turned the pulpit over to Aunt Ruby. She stood behind the pulpit and announced that she had something to say to the church.

She stated that the bible instructed Christians to bring their problems before the elders of the church to be resolved, and she had a problem. She proceeded to tell what had happened a few days earlier at her property. She said she knew some of the men involved in the incident and some of them were members of the congregation. As she stood there she looked around the sanctuary and said, “I know who you are and God knows who you are. You should be very ashamed of what you did and how you treated those people. You disrespected them and me. I don’t think God was very pleased, either. I don’t ever want to hear of this happening in our community again. If it does, the next time I am going to stand here and start naming names and I am certain you do not want me to do that.”

Then she sat down.

Aunt Ruby probably did more good through her short message that Sunday evening than the preacher could have done. I never heard of another incident like that in our community. She was a remarkable woman.

WILBUR BENNETT AND THE MILK COW

Among the many pranks my father pulled when he was a kid, the one he pulled on his Uncle Wilbur had to rank up there with the hen house shooting. I call it the “Corn Field Caper”.

My father died at age 59, but after hearing some of the stunts he pulled, I am surprised he made it to adulthood.

One summer night he was extremely bored. That was before the age of television and there was not a lot to do. He knew better than to fool around with his Uncle Walter again, so it must have been his Uncle Wilbur’s turn.

In those days people strapped a bell around their milk cow’s neck. That way they could locate them quickly when it was time to milk. Uncle Wilbur lived up the road from Daddy’s place. There was a corn field by his house and a cow pasture next to it. At night Uncle Wilbur put the milk cow in the barn and fed her so she would be ready to milk early the next morning.

Daddy had his own cow bell. He went over to his uncle’s place late one night after everyone was in bed. He got in the middle of Uncle Wilbur’s corn field and started ringing the cow bell. It was not long until a light came on and both Uncle Wilbur and Aunt Era were up and headed toward the corn field.

They could not figure out how their cow got out of the barn stall and jumped the fence into the corn field. One of the workers that lived on their farm had heard the bell moving through the corn and came to help.

Daddy was moving up and down the rows of corn.

“The cow’s over on the east side of the field. You go around that way and I’ll go this way and we’ll head her toward the gap. Era, go open the gap, we’ll head her your way!”

“Mister Bennett, that cow is spooked. It shore is moving fast.”

Daddy would run a while, then stop and lie down while his uncle and his helper passed him in the darkness. When they ran by him he would get up and take off in the opposite direction ringing the bell. That went on quite a while until my father decided it was time to slip out of the field. He could hear the two men gasping for breath while running up and down the rows of corn looking for the cow.

After a while he got back into the corn field and starting running toward the open gap. Aunt Era was on the porch hollering, “She’s headed for the barn, Wilbur.”

Daddy ran toward the barn and placed his hand inside the bell to stop the clapper. Then he walked back home before he got caught. He could hear them back behind him trying to figure out how the cow got back into the stall and closed the door behind her.

The next day he was walking up the road by their place and saw them sitting on the porch. He hollered out, “How are ya’ll doing?”

They gave him a dirty look. They had been out in the corn field earlier that day and discovered there were no cow tracks out there. The only tracks were shoe tracks about my father’s size. They had figured him out and they were not happy.

In later years Uncle Wilbur ran a Sinclair gas station on the south side of Louisville. I loved to go there because my father would buy a case of 6 oz Cokes once a month and I loved Cokes. They would let us have a Coke in the summer time at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. It was never any other time! If we missed the 3 o’clock hour we missed the chance for a Coca-Cola. I did not understand the reasoning behind that for a long time.

They were full of sugar and caffeine. When we drank them we were bouncing off the walls and they wanted the Coke to wear off before it was time for us to go to bed.

There was a man who would often stop at Uncle Wilbur’s gas station and ask him to clean his windshield. He did that several times without buying gas. Finally, Uncle Wilbur got tired of it and asked him why he only stopped in to have his windshield cleaned off and never bought any gas.

He explained he bought his gas up-town at a friend’s gas station. But, his friend could not clean a windshield as good as Uncle Wilbur. That made Uncle Wilbur mad. The next time the fellow pulled in to have his windshield cleaned my uncle reached for a greasy rag, went out to the car and wiped grease all over the guy’s windows.

That was the last time he came by to have his windshield cleaned.

CATHY BENNETT BARNES

Cathy is my third cousin. She is the daughter of Harry and Nita Bennett. Cathy and I are the same age and started school together. When I was in the first grade I did not realize she was my cousin. I thought she was my girlfriend.

When Cathy’s little brother, Wally, was born she phoned to give me the good news. I asked, “What are you going to name him?”

Cathy replied, “Wally.” I could not understand what she was saying and I asked, “What?”

Again she said, “Wally!” Still I could not understand her.

After the questioning went on for a while she was exasperated and exclaimed, “It’s Wally, you know… Wally… like you Wally {wallow} in the bed!” Then I understood.

We were seated near each other and one day we were playing with our safety scissors. I don’t know what came over us, but we decided to give each other a haircut. I took a cut out of her hair, and then she took a cut out of mine before the teacher saw us and intervened. The next day we had school pictures taken and there I sat with a big gap out of the front of my hair… but I was smiling!

We spent a lot of time together while growing up. We were more like brother and sister than cousins. We rode horses, fished, and camped out together. Often we called each other and worked on homework over the phone.

For a while I thought Cathy’s father invented the Hula-Hoop. When the Hula-Hoop craze caught on in the 60s Harry Bennett had the idea of taking rolled black plastic pipe and making Hula-Hoops for us. They owned Winston Building Supply and there was an abundance of the plastic piping in stock.

He cut the pipe into sections and stapled the ends together to make each of us our own Hula-Hoop. When I went back to school that fall I saw all the kids with the plastic hoops and thought that Harry had really hit upon something big. Little did I know someone had already beaten him to the punch. As it turned out the Hula-Hoop caught on after someone saw people in Australia using large rings to exercise with. The Wham-O Company picked up the idea and ran with it. They, also, bought the rights to a plastic disk called the Pluto Platter and made it a hit after they changed its name to Frisbee.

If I am not mistaken Cathy was with us the day we stopped the Trailways bus. My oldest brother’s friend was visiting the farm and he came up with an idea to tie fishing line to a purse and put it on the edge of the road. We ran the line up the bank on the side of the road and into the hayloft of our barn. Once there, we hid behind a bale of hay and waited for unsuspecting people to stop and try to pick up the purse. When they did we would snatch it away and drag it up the bank into the barn.

We were having a good time fooling people. One of our first victims was Nona Boswell, one of our neighbors. The car she was riding in stopped and let her out. She walked over to the purse and was going to pick it up. She happened to be standing straddle of our fishing line. As she stooped over to pick up the purse we snatched on the line and the purse shot between her legs and startled her! She screamed out and did a little jig sideways.

We could not contain ourselves. We were up in the loft dying with laughter. Nona turned around and saw us. Her face was awfully red, but she was laughing, too. She pointed her finger at us and was shaking it as she yelled out, “I ought to climb up there and tear you boys up!” We knew we were safe. There was no way Nona could make it up the bank, much less climb into the loft of that old barn.

Later that day a Trailways bus was traveling down the road and the driver saw the purse. As soon as he saw it he started putting on his brakes. It took a while before he came to a stop. Then he backed the bus up until he got to the purse.

All the people on the bus were watching out the window as he got out and walked over to the purse. As soon as he reached down to get it, we snatched it away. Everyone on the bus was laughing at him. He took it pretty well, I guess. After that, each time that driver came by our home, he sat down on his horn and blew it as he passed by.

One of the few vacations I remember going on was with Cathy and her family. We seldom took any trips. The farm and livestock kept my father busy and it was difficult to find anyone to look after them in our absence.

The Bennetts were going to Panama City, Florida and invited my brother, Tonny, and me to go along. We jumped at the opportunity to spend time with Dianne, Cathy and Wally. I had never seen the Gulf before and when we got there all I wanted to do was stay in the water. Harry bought us an air mattress and I surfed and floated on it for hours.

I have never had so much fun or been sunburned so badly in all my life. My back and legs looked like fried chicken. It was terrible, but I did not let it slow me down. I was on a vacation! We ate in real restaurants, played “Goofy Golf” and found sea shells at the beach. The trip to Panama City was one I will never forget.

Cathy had a beautiful voice and was often asked to sing at our church. She sang at school, too. She had the lead in our senior play, The Wizard of Oz, and when she sang Somewhere Over The Rainbow it was as if Judy Garland was actually there. I thought it was a very poignant reminder that we were entering another phase of our lives where our decisions would determine if our dreams would come true. Now, looking back over four decades I realize how important it was to put those dreams into action with our hearts, our brains and our courage.

Somewhere over the rainbow dreams can come true and the memories we made together as children have lasted a lifetime.

COTTON CLARK

Ervin Clark was our cousin. He was about my father’s age and when they were growing up, my father and Ervin did a lot together. Once they were going on a double date and Ervin showed up dressed in white pants and a white shirt. My father was not ready on time. He was still down at the barn milking when he saw Ervin walking toward him.

Daddy and Ervin were always playing tricks on each other. As it happened that day, my father had blown some eggs and hidden them around the barn. For those unfamiliar with blown eggs, you can take an egg… poke a tiny hole in the top and another slightly larger hole in the bottom. Then place your mouth on the top hole and blow really hard. The contents of the egg will eventually ooze out the bottom. Then you have an empty egg.

Rotten eggs were common on the farm. Sometimes chickens would abandon their nest and the eggs would go bad. When we found them we did not want to move them around a lot because they could explode and the contents would go everywhere. Whatever they hit would smell very bad.

As Ervin approached, my father quickly got the eggs and made a fake nest. Ervin walked up and was fussing at my father. He said, “You are going to make us late for our dates!”

Daddy apologized for running late, then, he said to Ervin, as he picked up a couple of eggs out of the nest, “I found this old hen nest and I think these eggs may be bad. See what you think.” As he was saying that he acted like he was going to hand them to Ervin, but instead, he dropped them about the time Ervin was reaching for them. Ervin was afraid they were going to explode and jumped straight up and grabbed a rafter in the barn. The eggs were directly beneath him and he was afraid to let go. He was afraid he would land on them and they would get all over his white clothes.

My father let him hang there until he finished milking. Then he went over and picked up the eggs, shook them and threw them at Ervin. Of course there was nothing there and when they hit him he was expecting them to make a mess. They just crumbled and fell to the ground.

Years later Ervin became a policeman. One Saturday while we were in town Daddy wanted to go by the old courthouse and visit with him. I always thought it was a spooky building. The old building looked like a Gothic fortress standing in the center of town. It was a tall grey structure with long windows to ventilate the building during the hot days of summer.

In front of it was an old stone wishing well covered with a little roof. I have no idea if the well was ever used in days past, but I often ran over to it when we walked nearby to peer into its depths. At one point in time a metal grating had been placed about six feet below the rim to prevent little boys like me from falling down the shaft. There were always pennies lodged on the grating that didn’t make it into the well and I wondered if those that were hung up on the metal were wishes that never came true.

When we went to his office he was seated behind his desk. I was small and sat on my father’s lap. They were talking and forgot I was listening. Ervin began talking about some man they had arrested for strangling his wife to death. He said they had enough evidence to convict him. They even had the piece of cloth that he killed her with.

He said he had the cloth there in a box behind his desk and got it out to show my father. As he was handing it to Daddy he said, “Look, it still has the skin embedded in it where he had it wrapped around her neck!”

I looked at the cloth and sure enough there was skin all over it! It was then my father became aware I was listening and watching. He handed the cloth back to Ervin, who realized what he had done and apologized. After that the conversation became more boring.

When my wife and I married she had never heard of Ervin. We all called him “Cotton” because his hair was so white. Even as a young man it was white. One day she was home alone when an old car pulled into the driveway by our house. She was a little scared being out in the country by herself.

Cotton got out, reached into the back of his car and pulled out an old suit case. He had on some old work clothes and an old big brimmed hat. She watched as he walked up to the screen door and knocked.

She went to the door and greeted him, not knowing who he was. He asked her, “Have they told you about me yet?”

She did not have a clue and he could see it in her eyes.

He said, “I’m Cotton Clark. I am a relative of yours now that you married Harold’s boy. I really don’t have a home. All I have is that old car over there and I go from cousin to cousin and live with each of them for a while. Guess what? It is your turn to let me live with you for a couple of months!”

Tina just stood there. She did not know what to say!

He let her think for a minute before he started laughing. He explained that he was our cousin, but he was not going to stay. He just wanted to meet her and welcome her to the family. She was much relieved. I guess it was payback for what Daddy did to him with the eggs.

Ervin Clark passed away a few years after my father died. He was one of several descendants of John and Sally Clark. One brother, Thomas Dionysius Clark moved to Kentucky when he was a young man and became a history professor at The University of Kentucky. Thomas wrote many books on Kentucky and its history. He became Kentucky’s Historian Laureate and lived to be nearly 102 years old. His other siblings were Marvin, Ellie, Ernest, Wilma and Ethel. At age 100 Ernest writes a column for The Winston County Journal in my hometown.

ALICE FOSTER

Alice Usula Cockrell Foster was my maternal grandmother. I called her Momma Foster. She was a quiet person and did not appear to have much joy about her. She had a hard life being one of fourteen children who grew up in rural Mississippi. I have mentioned in a previous chapter that she was a hard worker. She once picked a bale of cotton in a day. A bale of cotton weighs about 500 pounds and it is very difficult for anyone to pick that much cotton.

She married my grandfather, Urban Amilton Foster, and they had seven children. Papa Foster was a telegrapher for the railroad and they moved around a lot. It was a rough life and it, along with alcohol, took its toll on their marriage. I cannot remember them ever living together.

Momma Foster did not have a home. She would stay with one of her children for a few months. Then she would move on to live with another one. It was, actually, sad. The only possessions I remember her having, aside from her clothes, were a cedar chest and a foot stool floor fan. Whenever she moved she took the cedar chest and the floor fan.

I remember my mother’s cedar chest. Occasionally, she would go through it and I watched as she showed me her treasures. There were locks of hair she saved from when we were babies. In it she kept our baby shoes and pictures we had colored for her. I don’t remember anything of real value, but each item meant something to her. In the bottom of the chest she kept a few clothes.

I cannot remember seeing Momma Foster open her cedar chest. I often wondered what treasures she may have had in there. As often as she moved around she probably did not have room for anything extra. Her whole life was in that box.

She had no money and we did not expect any presents from her on our birthdays or at Christmas, but one year she made each of her grandchildren a Santa from a goblet. My Aunt Mavis was creative and she bought her several goblets and some red and white felt. She sewed little Santa hats to fit over the tops of the goblets and pasted on a nose, eyes and a beard. Then she made candy and filled each one to the brim. I still have mine and I put it out each Christmas to remember her.

She was not fat, but she was not thin. I can remember sitting on her lap when I was little and it was comfortable. She wore glasses and had silver hair. On Sundays she wore hats and long white gloves. She had asthma and would have to take out an inhaler made of glass with a red rubber squeeze ball on one end. When she had difficulty breathing she would use it and it seemed to help.

She took a lot of other medicine, but I have no idea what it was for. Tabor Drugs appreciated her business and every Easter Bill Tabor would send her a potted Easter Lily. After they quit blooming she would have me take them outside and plant them in the flower bed by my bedroom.

She had 13 brothers and sisters. She said her brother, Chester, died during the Great War. I guess it must have been World War I, since that would have been about the right time frame for their age. The others would come out to the farm and visit her each May. That was the month for memorials at all the little country churches. It was like a reunion every year. They would go to the church where their parents were members and then visit the cemetery to place flowers on their graves.

I can remember sitting on the front porch steps while they all gathered on the porch and talked about the “old times”. I wish I had paid more attention to their stories, but all those stories have passed away just like all of them. There was no one to record those events for the next generation.

As time went by, Momma Foster began to “slip”. We would all joke and say she was getting forgetful in her old age. We did not realize she was showing the early signs of Alzheimer’s disease. At that time it was called, “hardening of the arteries”.

At first she misplaced things. Then she would forget events and people she had known all her life. She realized something was wrong and it bothered her. Occasionally, I saw panic in her eyes when she realized others were suspecting something was wrong with her. She was embarrassed and ashamed.

I was at home the morning it happened. At first I did not know what was going on. My mother was screaming and crying for my father. I can remember him running into the bathroom and yelling for Mother to call the doctor and tell him to get there quick. I walked down the hall and saw blood covering the floor in the bathroom. Then I realized what she had done and I was scared to death. She did not die. Well, not physically.

Little by little she slipped further and further away until she no longer knew who we were. Family members gathered together and decided they needed to put her where she could be looked after better. The closest nursing home was nearly 100 miles away in Jackson, Mississippi. I came home from school one day and she was no longer there.

She passed away in March of 1965. Her body had finally joined her mind in death. I do not remember much about the funeral. I just know her brothers and sisters came back for it and then I hardly ever saw them again. The chapter had closed on another generation as quietly as closing a book when a story has finished.

Easter came and I looked out at the flower bed one day. The Easter Lilies I had planted for her were back. It was a strange feeling seeing them. In one sense it was a comforting reminder of her. On the other hand it was a sad reminder she was gone and she was no longer around to ask me to take her Easter Lilies outside and plant them in the flower bed. As long as I lived at Oak Hill Farm the flowers Mr. Tabor had sent her each Easter reminded me that she had been there and that was enough for me.

CRAIG FOSTER

Craig is my first cousin. His parents were Zawon and Joyce Foster. They had two other children, Margaret and Mary Anna. Craig and I were very close growing up. We stayed at each other’s homes a lot.

I loved to go to his home because he lived in town and there were bicycles at his house that actually worked! Craig and I would ride them all over Louisville.

The two of us stayed over at our Aunt Mavis’s house a lot, too. There was a tree house on the street behind her house that was really neat. It was built out over the street in a huge old oak tree. In the summer time the leaves hid it well. We camped out in it once and almost got in trouble.

We stocked it with water balloons during the day and that night we dropped them on cars as they passed beneath us. Unless the people knew there was a tree house up there, they had no idea where the balloons were coming from.

Unfortunately, someone came along that did know it was there and he got out and gave us a pretty good tongue lashing.

Craig liked to come out to the farm because he loved tractors and just being out in the country. We made forts in the hay loft, went on hikes, rode horses and went fishing. We had a lot of fun together.

Craig’s father, Zawon had a squirrel dog named Callie and he would take us hunting in the fall. One year he took us out east of Louisville squirrel hunting in some woods that belonged to a timber company. We were doing pretty well until we encountered a squirrel that ran up a hollow tree.

Zawon, said, “I think we can smoke him out, boys.”

We stuffed news papers into the hollow and set them on fire. We waited and waited, but the squirrel never fell out. Then we looked up we noticed the tree was hollow all the way to the top. The squirrel had gone out the top and the flames had, too. The tree was on fire!

We took our caps and used them to carry water from a nearby stream to extinguish the flames. The tree was still smoldering, so, we ended up carrying mud and throwing it into the hollow until it quit burning. That was a close one. We could have burned down the whole forest trying to get that squirrel.

When Craig was younger he was afraid of chickens. I called it chick-a-phobia. We kept our chickens in a pen and a chicken house. He would not go near it. Occasionally, one would get out in the yard and Craig would have a fit until we got it back into the pen.

I suppose I am partly to blame for Craig’s fear of chickens. While we were playing one day I tricked him into going into the chicken house and latched the door behind him. I thought it was all in fun and did not realize how much I had terrified him. I will probably pay for that little act of terrorism in the here-after.

I was three years older and as we grew up life began to take us in different directions about the time I entered high school. I guess it is natural, but I missed the closeness we had in our youth and those were times I will cherish forever.

ALLEN RAY FOSTER AND THE PERSIMMON TREE

When I was little, my older cousins, Al Foster and Gaines Hall, came out to the farm for a visit. Gaines was from Dothan, Alabama and was a little older and wiser than Al. Gaines knew what persimmons were.

For those not familiar with persimmons, they are the fruit that grow on persimmon trees. When they are ripe they turn orange and are good to eat. Possums love them and it was not unusual to see possums climbing up a persimmon tree at night in late fall to eat the ripened fruit. That was probably where the terminology “possum grapes” originated from.

However, if you bite into a persimmon before it is ripe it has the effect of making the mouth feel as if it is drawing up. It is awful. The sour sensation does not last long and your mouth soon returns to normal.

My father, Al and Gaines were walking around the farm one afternoon and they came upon a persimmon tree. It was too early in the year for the persimmons to be ripe. My father winked at Gaines and said, “Man oh man, look at those persimmons. I’ll bet they are good.”

He pick one off the tree, wiped it off and put it in his mouth and wallowed it around as if he were chewing it. Gaines picked one off the tree and did the same. They were commenting on how good the persimmons were that year. Then my father looked at Al and asked, “Would you like to have a persimmon?”

Al loved food… any food. He took after his father, Elton. He looked at them and said, “Yeah! Give me one.”

He took a big bite and the expression on his face turned to shock.

My father looked at him and asked, “Did you get a bad one? Boy, I sure hope not.”

It was evident that Al was beginning to panic. He looked at Daddy and said, “I think I did. What is going to happen to me?”

My father shook his head and said, “If it feels like your mouth is shrinking up you got a bad one, Al.”

Al nodded.

“Well, son, I am afraid your mouth is going to shrink up to the size of a pea. If it does that… that is all you will ever be able to eat. You will have to take one pea at a time and push it into your mouth.”

Al began to cry. He put both index fingers in his mouth and began to stretch his mouth out. All the while he was crying and saying, “No… No… No….” Then he turned before they could stop him and ran all the way to the house while stretching his mouth open.

When Daddy and Gaines returned to the house there sat three unhappy people; Al, his mother, Mavis, and my mother. It took them a while to get over it and Al never ate another persimmon.

EDDIE AND THE ANTS

There was a gully not far from our house that always held water. When we were little we would go into the pasture where it was and play there.

My mother did not like us playing down there because our clothes would always get the red mud on them and it was hard for her to wash it out. We had learned that if we stripped down to our underwear she could not tell if we had been playing there.

One day our cousin, Eddie Foster, came out to the farm and we managed to end up at the gully. We told Eddie what we did and he wanted to play in the water, too. We all stripped down to our underwear and set our clothes in the grass at the top of the bank.

We had been down there playing in the water a long time when we heard a car horn blowing at our house. It was Eddie’s mother. She was blowing her horn because it was time for them to go home.

We all scampered up the bank and started throwing on our clothes. We got dressed and started running toward the house. Eddie was running faster than us. He was whooping and hollering and slapping his behind.

We thought he was playing horse, so we did the same thing. We were all galloping, whooping and hollering as we slapped our behinds to sound like a horse running through the pasture.

By the time we got to the house Eddie was nearly in tears. Unfortunately, he had placed his pants on top of an ant bed. His pants were full of ants and the whooping, hollering and slapping he was doing was because the ants were stinging him. He was not playing horse after all.

When Mother found out where we had taken him she took a switch to us. We were all whooping and hollering in pain, too.

There was another time Eddie came out to our farm to play with us. It was the time he nearly wiped out part of our family tree… well at least a couple of limbs. One afternoon his mother, Mavis Foster, thought it would be a nice day for a drive out to our place. Riding with her in the front seat of their car was my elderly grandmother, Alice Foster and Eddie’s paternal grandmother whom he affectionately called Big Momma.

Mavis and the two ladies were sitting there chatting and unaware what was about to take place in the back seat. Unbeknownst to them, there was trouble brewing back there.

Eddie had brought with him a few cherry bombs that he planned on sharing with us when he arrived at the farm. Evidently, the anticipation of firing them off was more than he could stand. He decided he would light one and throw it out the window.

While the ladies were busy chatting and taking in the sights of the country on their trip out of town, Eddie was fumbling with a match and a cherry bomb in the back seat… I know you can see this one coming.

He managed to get the match lit and applied the ignition source to the designated area on the cherry bomb. As he tried to pitch it hurriedly out the rear window he missed his target and it bounced back onto the floor in front of him.

It was a short fuse and the rest is history. Eddie tried to muffle the explosion by putting his feet over the cherry bomb. The peaceful drive suddenly erupted into pandemonium when the explosion took place and fumes began to fill the car. If you have never been in an automobile when such an unexpected blast took place… just use your imagination.

I suppose you can also use your imagination as to how the driver and the two elderly ladies in the front of the car reacted and what happened to poor little Eddie on the back seat after the first shock wave subsided and the ringing in their ears faded away. My Aunt Mavis had her own little fireworks display.

As for my brothers and me, we never experienced the thrill of seeing the cherry bombs blowing up when Eddie arrived at the farm that afternoon and hobbled out of the car.

ELTON FOSTER GOES TO NEW YORK

Elton Foster was Al and Eddie’s father. One cannot truly appreciate Elton unless they had the opportunity to meet him. He was one of a kind. He was short, fat, had a receding hair line, and normally, there was a cigar in his hand.

I believe he used the cigar more as a speaking aid than to smoke. He had an aristocratic southern air about him. He always referred to my brothers and me as “old gobbler”. It was either, Ricky old gobbler, Terry old gobbler or Tonny old gobbler.

He did not like it when we called him Uncle Elton. He said that made him feel old, so we called him Elton.

Elton worked with his parents at their department store in Louisville. His father, Roscoe, would say there was no sound sweeter to him than hearing the old cash register bell ding and the drawer open. He knew a clerk was about to put some money in it.

Roscoe sent Elton to New York once on a buying trip for the store. Elton never met a stranger and he was never intimidated by anyone he met.

He had made reservations at a nice hotel in the city. I cannot remember which one it was, but it had a famous name. It was world renowned back in the 40s and 50s. Elton walked up to the desk to check in and the gentleman behind the desk was making pleasant conversation with him and asking him a few questions before he signed in.

He asked Elton where he was from. Elton replied, “I am from Louisville, Mississippi.”

The gentleman responded, “I am afraid I have never heard of that place.”

To which Elton calmly replied, “Well old gobbler, I do believe the folks in Louisville, Mississippi are a lot smarter than the folks here in New York.”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, son everyone in Louisville knows where New York is!”

The man was speechless.

HIS NAME IS EARLE

Earle Newman was our cousin from Birmingham, Alabama. Earle, Irene and his children would come to Louisville for a visit each year. When they did, they always came out to the farm.

Earle was a Ford Car Salesman and a jack of all trades. He loved to make home movies with his 8 millimeter camera. He, also, liked to show off his movies. At night we would tack up a sheet on the living room wall and he would show movie after movie of their family trips and any odd thing he happened to have come upon along the way.

He always brought some new “toy” with him. Once he brought out a miniature cannon. It was about a foot or two long and extremely heavy. What its purpose was, I have no idea. But, it actually worked. He would load it with powder and fire it off. It was so loud our cows would all run to the back of the pasture to get away from the noise.

Earle loved to go to army surplus stores and find anything “military” that might be fun to play with. On one trip, he brought out a flare gun he had recently purchased at the surplus store. Why he thought he needed a flare gun, I’ll never know, but if an emergency occurred he was going to be ready.

The afternoon after my great-grandmother’s funeral he brought it out to the house and was going to play with it. He had several shells with him and wanted to fire them off. It had been an unusually dry summer and things were turning brown on the farm.

Daddy told Earle that firing it off on such a hot dry day might not be a good idea. He was afraid the fields and pastures might catch on fire, but Earle assured him the flares were cool by the time they reached the ground. They were designed to be extinguished on the way down.

He shot one up in the air and a steamer of fire and smoke flew way up. When it was very high a parachute opened up and it drifted to the ground far away in the hay field. All of us kids ran after it to get the parachute. They were fun to play with.

The last one he shot did not work like the rest of them had. It was still burning when it hit the ground. My father’s eyes got real big and we could all see the panic set in. Our hay field was on fire! We all ran out and started fighting the fire.

We had an old dinner bell by the driveway and someone ran out and started ringing it. Not only was it a dinner bell, it was also used in the event of an emergency. Neighbors heard the bell and it was not long before the hay field was full of people fighting the fire.

Fortunately, we were able to get it under control before it spread very far. Earle was worn out from fighting the fire. He was, also, very embarrassed. My father told him he could not bring any more of his “hot” toys out to the farm again because they were not as much fun for him as they were for Earle.

After that Earle stuck to his movie career.

ELIZABETH KEMERY AND BUFFALO BILL CODY

Elizabeth Kemery was the maiden name of Tina’s grandmother who married George B. Mercer. Elizabeth lived in Philadelphia and West Chester, Pennsylvania when she was a young girl. Later she moved to Downing town where she met and married George.

When she was young there was a man by the name of William Frederick Cody who happened to cross her path one day. William was better known as Buffalo Billy Cody, the famous American soldier, bison hunter and showman. By the time their paths crossed Buffalo Bill had been a fighter for a free Kansas, served in the 3rd Calvary Regiment of the Civil War, been a Medal of Honor recipient and provided buffalo meat to the U.S. Army out west. Providing buffalo meat for the army was how he received his nick-name.

When she met him he was touring with his traveling show called BUFFALO BILL’S WILD WEST or BUFFALO BILL’S WILD WEST & CONGRESS OF ROUGH RIDERS OF THE WORLD which was his latter show. The latter included American Indians, Turks, Gauchos, Arabs, Mongols and Cossacks.

They performed throughout the United States and Europe. His shows included reenactments of the PONY EXPRESS and CUSTER’S LAST STAND. A few of the people touring with him were Annie Oakley, Sitting Bull, Frank Butler and Gabriel Dumont.

When Elizabeth met him he was performing in Philadelphia and had come to town for supplies. For some reason he sat down on porch near where Elizabeth was and fell asleep.

While he was asleep Elizabeth strolled up and started playing with his long hair. She had recently learned how to Platt and before she knew it she had platted his hair into pigtails!

After she was finished she got bored and left, but when Buffalo Bill woke from his nap he was surprised to find himself sporting a new hair-do.

Buffalo Bill was born in Iowa Territory in 1846 and died in 1917. He is buried in Golden, Colorado.

Est “Omnia in Familia” Infera forma. (It’s “All in the Family” Southern style.)

Continued in Beyond the Cotton Fields, Part 4

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Rick Algood
December 13, 2017