As I mention before, the back door of the kitchen opened onto the back porch. It was screened just like the front porch and that was where we kept the churn and where we made butter. My father had rigged up an electric motor that was mounted to the wall and it was geared down to rotate very slow. It worked well and rescued us boys from having to sit there and manually churn the butter.

Along with Snowball’s corn, we kept the dog food back there, too. There were always cats and dogs hanging around our back door. When we had scraps or leftovers from the table, my mother would open the screen door and throw toss the leftovers out into the yard. Dogs and cats listened for her and they would come running for those scraps.

On the screen door, there was a little rope with several brass bells attached to it. When the door opened the bells would ring. Not only did the cats and dogs learn to listen for the bells, but there was a mouse that picked up on it too. Sometimes when the door opened, that mouse would hear it, jump onto the back porch and would run and hide behind the feed. When it was quiet and he thought it was safe to come out he would get into their food.

That went on for a while until we were able to catch him. He was the fattest mouse I have ever seen.

A hall divided the house almost in half. Well, the original part of house. At the end of the hall just off the kitchen was my Grandmother’s room. That was the room where my grandfather had died 12 years before I was born. I always had an eerie feeling about that room when I was a kid.

Just down the hall from my grandparent’s bedroom was my father’s and uncle’s bedroom. By the time I came along it had been converted into a large bathroom. It was pink and blue. I can’t say it was very pretty, but it was big. When I was very small we had one of those large claw foot tubs that seemed big enough to go swimming in. When my parents remodeled the kitchen they remodeled the bathroom too and went with a tub that had no feet.

Back up the hall toward the front of the house was the den. When my parents first married it was their bedroom. After my brothers came along it got crowded in there so they added on to the house and built two more bedrooms, one for them and one for all of us boys.

My brothers and I shared the larger bedroom on the end of the addition. As we grew we became more territorial about “our own space”. There were invisible lines that defined whose space was whose and we were not to enter each other’s “space” without permission or all heck would break loose.

One morning when I was very young, my mother came into our room to wake me up and get me going for the day. I wasn’t there. She assumed I had already gotten up so she began to look for me.

She went from room to room to no avail. I was not to be found. Annie Mae was my mother’s housekeeper and she joined the search party. They called out my name. They searched all the closets thinking I might be hiding in one of them.

Then they began to panic. They went outside and checked the sandbox, the tractor sheds, the hen house and anywhere they thought I might have gone. Eventually, someone was so concerned they sent word to my father in the field and told him his baby boy had disappeared. They feared I might have fallen into the well or wandered off into the woods or even the swamp.

They were preparing to organize a search party when I walked into the kitchen and announced that I was ready for breakfast. As it turned out, sometime during the night I had fallen out of bed and rolled beneath it. There I slept until I awoke the next morning.

When that addition was added on, my father had a breaker box installed in his closet. There were times we would be making too much noise in our room and he would warn us to be pipe down or he would have to kill the power. Several times we had friends over and they were stunned when all the lights went out in our bedroom. But it worked. We could not see to play, so we had to go to sleep.

To get to our room, we had to enter through my parent’s room from the den or go down the back hall that was beside their bedroom door - which was always open. It was an odd layout, but a smart one. When we got older and were driving, we had to enter the house through the outside entrance that opened into their room. They knew exactly when we came home.

There was no coming in late; no smoking, drinking or anything else. They would have known. I was rather proud when I figured out how to pick the latch on the front porch and sneak into the house a different way.

I would take off my shoes and ease down the hall to my room without having to enter through the outside door through their bedroom.

It worked pretty well most of the time. Occasionally, my father would rouse and ask what time it was. I would always say, “Plenty minutes past ten.” He had trouble hearing and thought I said twenty minutes past ten. That only worked until they replaced the old windup clock with an electric one with a lighted dial.

However, there was that one summer night when I was sneaking in later than usual. It was a hot night, and we had no air-conditioning in the house.

However, they did have a large metal window fan that blew air from a window out in the hall through an open door and across their bed.

The old fan vibrated and rattled really bad, but I had learned that I could press on its top right corner to quieten down.

That night as I passed the fan, it was rattling louder than normal, instinctively I reached out to push on it when my fingers went into the metal blades. Whack, whack, whack!

That happened to be the night my father had decided to turn the fan around and have it pull air across their bed from the windows on the front of the house, rather than having it blow on them. I didn’t know that.

Those metal blades did a number on my fingers and I screamed out in pain. My father woke up and hollered, “Cut that out!”

I managed to get it together and said, “I think I did. I think I cut off all my fingers!”

When the lights were turned on there was blood all over the wallpaper, the floor and me. I probably should have had stitches, but we did not go to the doctor in those days unless it was a life or death situation. Plus, I was afraid they were going to catch me with cigarette smoke on my breath, so I just brushed it off and hurried on to bed. I still carry those scars to this day.

During the school year I would have to go to sleep with the lights on because my brothers were always up late studying; something I should have taken note of.

One night before they turned in, they woke me up and told me I had overslept. Of course, they were still dressed so I thought I really had overslept. They said the school bus had turned down Shiloh Road and it would be coming for us in a few minutes.

I panicked. I jumped up from bed, threw on my clothes, grabbed my books and started barreling down the hall. Needless to say, I woke my parents who had been sound asleep and they wanted to know what in the world I was doing.

I stood there for a second before it hit me. By that time my brothers had undressed, turned off the lights and jumped into bed. I could hear them laughing beneath their covers when I walked back into the room. There was no way to get them back. They were older and already knew all the tricks.

(To be continued)

Me in my suspenders. Terry is sitting to the left and Tonny is standing behind.	This is a picture of me prior to my first haircut.
Louisville around 1964.	This is the gas station that was directly across from the post office. It was on the corner of Main and South Columbus Avenue.

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Rick Algood
August 21, 2021