My Hillbilly Childhood..

(I wrote this several years ago, so my kids would have some knowledge of my childhood and my parents.)


A full life and a mostly satisfying one.
But there will be a mystery that will linger long after I’m gone.
Who am I?
Where did I come from?
What are my roots?
I shall never know.
I did not pursue my adoption during my early years.
Too busy working; rearing a family, all the things you do to keep your head above the lip of the cup when it seems the dregs are trying to draw you to the bottom.
And now, in the retirement years, (1992) too many years have gone by.
If my birth mother were alive, she’d be in her 80s.
If she were 16 when I was born, she’d be 79.
(I started writing this in 1999—a year after I retired).
Perhaps its better not to know.
But there’s always that nagging thought rattling around, that nagging wonder...
I didn’t know I was adopted until I was close to my 22nd birthday.
     I was completing 45 months in the U.S. Air Force, was married and we had a four month old daughter, when I found out.
I had come home to my parents in Bluefield, W.Va. to try out as a reporter for the Bluefield Daily Telegraph.
     If things didn’t work out, I was going to reenlist; I was a staff sergeant with the promise of a promotion. And, after all, I had a journalist job description, so the duty wasn’t all that bad.
But I was going through a box of my writings from high school when I came
across a much-folded and creased bunch of letters in the bottom of the box. The letters were from the Tazewell County (Va.) welfare department concerning one Earnest Thomas Francisco.
ME.
The letters were very sketchy...confirming appointments to sign adoption papers...confirming someone would visit the house... Nothing that would really give me a clue as to my real parents.
What did I feel when I discovered that the two wonderful people who I had called Mommy and Daddy were not really my blood?
I did not feel angry.
I did not feel sick, you know, that sinking feeling that drops your stomach on your boot tops.

A great feeling of what I can only describe now as love came over me.
Love for two souls who had taken me in, nurtured me, and taught me values that would guide me the rest of my life.
They really had very few material things.
Their son and daughter were both grown when they took me in.
It was during the Great Depression when Spotswood Anderson and Virginia Caroline Moore took in kids from broken homes until those homes could be put back together again.
In return, they got a few bucks from the welfare department. But when they took me in, they decided to keep me.
I was about 18 months old.
And they decided to adopt.
Except the final papers were never filed, so I was never legally adopted until I was 50 years old. At that time I managed through a lawyer to cut through the Virginia red tape and get my birth certificate that showed I was born in a Richmond, Va., hospital to an Ethel Cleveland Francisco.
With that certificate I had my name legally changed.
I completed the adoption that way and I knew my folks were smiling down on me, because looking back on their lives; UP THERE is the only place two such marvelous people could have gone.
Actually, finding those papers brought back memories of growing up...attending funerals of old family friends and having somebody there say: “Oh, this is the boy you raised.”
And having Mom or Dad quickly say:
“Oh, no, this is our son.”
When I confronted Dad the next day with what I found, he refused to talk about it.
And tears came to his eyes.
He just sat there, chewing on the big wad of Browns Mule Chewing Tobacco that was ever present in the right side of his cheek.
Perhaps chewing a bit harder.
I put my arm around him and bent over with my head next to his.
I can still smell that wet, tobacco odor that I always associated with him.
I told him that what I had found did not change my feelings toward him and Mom. That, if anything, I loved them even more.
Because they wanted me.
I was theirs by choice.
Perhaps this explained why we moved so much as I was growing up.
I never finished a year at the same school until I was in the sixth grade. We moved, 50 miles this way, 50 miles that way. If Dad could make a few dollars on a home, he sold it and we moved.
I think he did this so if somebody came looking to take me away from them, those people would have a hard time locating us.
He knew, at least he said, nothing about any of my blood relatives and had not tried to find out anything. He had no explanation for why the final adoption papers were never filed. And Mom knew even less than he.
    The welfare office with all its files had burned. I did find an entry in a court record that was very sketchy—the first filing for adoption. But that was all.
Of course, I suppose, there is a downside (or maybe its an up) to this situation. One time I sat down at a health fair, filled out all the information on the form that was going to be fed into a computer and tell me the chances for bad breath and the like.
Except you have to have some sort of medical history of your relatives. Foster folks don’t count.
So I’ll never know if the stroke I suffer, the heart attack that strikes, the legs pains that cramp...if they’re a family trait or all mine, a product of our modern age.

THE CHILDHOOD YEARS:

My earliest memories?
A lot are fragments. And some make you wonder if you remember because someone told you about an incident when you were small, and that sticks with you and you remember the telling as if it were the actual incident.
.I was probably five years old. We live in North Tazewell, Va., in a house rented from Dad’s brother.
Dad’s brother was the moneyman, he was the contractor.
Dad was the laborer. He was the carpenter. He did the work.
And got 50 cents an hour.

Grandmother Moore lived with Uncle Will and Aunt Mag and their 5 daughters.
Dad’s half sister, Maggie Spence also live with them.
Grandmother was bedridden.
Her image is a blur now, but I can recall clutching wild flowers I had picked and handing them to her.
She took them and held them to her breast.
Grandmother had been married three times.
She had children by all three husbands.
Moore was the last and she had three sons.
Spence, I think was number two.
A Mundy was the first.
Mom passed down the story of Grandmother’s life to me.
How she lived in parts of Virginia that one day would be overrun by Union troops during the Civil War. And the next day, the Confederates would chase them back.
She, as a young girl, would have to help the family hide their food and belongings to keep them from the thieving armies.
She was almost 100 when she died.
That was my first brush with grief, but I was too young to know just what was going on.
I only knew that I could no longer take her flowers. Her bed was empty.
She had gone away to be with the Lord.
    Aunt Mag Spence was probably under 5 feet in height.
    Her back had been broken as a child and, as a result, she was a hunchback.
    A feisty, happy person who loved her nieces and nephews.
    She had no kids of her own.
    So Uncle Oll and Aunt Stella lent her one of theirs—cousin Becky Mae.
    Becky Mae lived with Aunt Mag, providing the companionship and love that would have fallen to a daughter.
It also took some of the financial pressure off Uncle Oll, who had enough other mouths to feed.
    Aunt Mag Spence was rarely without her corncob pipe..
    Looking back and remembering her puffing away, she now reminds me of Ll’ Abner’s Mama Yokum.
    Aunt Mag was not above trying new things---especially to improve her appearance.
    Her hair was almost completely gray.
    So she took the hair by the roots and decided to try one of the new hair dyes on the market.
    It turned her hair all right, but not the color she wanted.
    For several months she had to live with a lot of purple streaks.
    It was if I was an only child with a big brother and sister Willie Mae who was born in 1906 and James Edward (everybody called him Ed) born in 1904.
And this was 1936.
Ed was married and living in Cincinnati as was Willie Mae and her husband, Lewis Kendall.
Their visits were happy occasions.
And I could always count on gifts.
The one that seems to stand out was the year Ed and his first wife, Daisy, came and she brought me a toy shotgun.
But Ed had married into a family born under a star of tragedy.
While visiting with Ed, a sister of his wife’s stuck her head in the oven of the gas stove in their apartment and turned on the gas.
There was an Uncle who was visiting, put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger a year or so later. A couple of other relatives did themselves in but not in Ed’s home.
It wasn’t long after the second suicide, Ed showed up by himself...the couple had parted and a divorce was in the works.
Soon after Willie Mae and her husband, Lewis, came back to Virginia.
Ed moved in with us and went to work in a filling station (that’s what we used to called a gasoline station).
Willie Mae and Lewis bought a filling station store and restaurant in Pounding Mill, about 20 or 30 miles away.

CHILDHOOD VIGNETTES:

Dad always kept a pistol at home just in case somebody might try to steal his chickens in a henhouse behind our house.
But he didn’t want me to get my hands on it.
So he kept it locked in his heavy wooden toolbox on the front porch.
The bullets were kept in the tray in the top of the toolbox, the pistol in among the tools underneath.
Many times he would hear a noise.
A chicken would cackle.
He’d jump out of bed, sure somebody was after the chickens.
He’d dash onto the porch, even in winter weather wearing only his long johns.
Sometimes the trap door was buttoned.
Other times it was flapping in the breeze.
But he would grab the key to the toolbox off the nail beside the kitchen stove, unlock the door, run outside (barefooted) and fumble with the lock on the toolbox until he had it opened.
Reaching inside, he’d find the bullets and the gun, load it and then start for the henhouse at the back of the yard. By this time Mama had caught up with him with his shoes and his overcoat.
He’d push his feet into the shoes, she’d help him on with the coat and he’d tell her:
“Now, Jennie, you get back in the house.”
He never did find a chicken thief.
Two legged or Four.
I think what caused the ruckus among the chickens most of the time was some fox or raccoon, some wild animal lurking about.
And even if this 6 foot Irishman had found somebody in the chicken house, I know that he would never harm him.
In fact, he probably would have handed him a second chicken
if the fellow gave him a two-handkerchief hard-luck story.
And despite all the rumors that flew later in life, he did not rush out one night in such a hurry that the trapdoor to his drawers was down and Mama failed to catch up with him with the overcoat.
As the story goes, he was in a crouch, hurrying to the henhouse when an old  cold-nosed hound came up behind him.
The rumors have him firing six shots and killing three chickens.
Strictly rumors. Never happened.

It’s odd what sticks with you over the years.
A neighbor up the dirt road that ran past out house and into a hollow that nestled between the gentle rolling hills of Western Virginia, raised sugar cane...the kind that eventually comes out old fashioned sorghum molasses.
It makes my lips curl up and the mouth juices flow just to think about it.
And the whole neighborhood...probably 15 houses at that time, would pitch in in the fall to harvest the cane and turn it into molasses.
The stalks were brought to a grinder to be fed in to extract the juice. The grinder was powered by a couple of horses going round and round in a circle.
The juice came out in a huge homemade pan, almost the size of a small room. Underneath was a fire that had to be constantly stoked and one of the jobs assigned to the kids was to keep the wood coming to keep the fire going.
The steam and aroma that came off was a prelude to what you knew would be the end product that would wind up in your folks’ cupboard.
And at the end of the day, the dark, sticky syrup was drained off into kegs.
Each family got a share for pitching in...

We had to rely on a spring for drinking and bath water.
Dad would bring in some, but mostly that task fell to Mama, all
five-feet three of her.
She never complained.
But then, my Uncle decided it would be nice to have running
water in his house. And since the spring was across the road at our house, he supposed he could also put it in for us.
Of course he also saw a chance with the improvement, to raise the rent.
So a big hole appeared in our yard.
Before the pump house would be built over it, at least two cows, who had a habit of wandering where the grass is the greenest, fell into the hole, which of course, as it was dug over a spring, and what with the rains, was filled with water.
Fortunately none drowned.
And with a sling around their bellies and a block and
tackle, the hapless animals were rescued....

.... An incident that might not have happened had not the pump house been built, sticks with me. Sometimes I think, in looking back, it was a preview of my life in some ways, even though I was only 6.
Even then, I loved to share with others.
There was a piece of flexible metal tubing, the type used to protect electrical wiring.
It had been discarded and I picked it up.
I found that if I blew into one end, I got a whistling
sound.
A happy sound to a young boy.
My cousin, who was about 6 months older, was envious.
After all, her father had the pump house built, so that piece of musical tubing was really hers.
I offered to share. I just didn’t want to keep such a good thing to myself.
I wanted her to have the same pleasure as I was getting from tooting on the tubing.
I went to where Dad cut wood for the stove.
Got the axe, and whacked away at the tubing.
I gave half to Billie.
But, alas, in the process, something had happened.
The tubing had lost its music.
Neither part would utter a sound....

     Aunt Mag was a neatnick.
She was more than that.
Cleanness was a religion.
If a speck of dusk landed on her collection of mustache cups, she would exorcise it forthwith. Mama, Dad and I would go over occasionally for Sunday
dinner. The table, at least 12 feet long, would be laden with ham, chicken, pork chops, vegetables of all kinds, biscuits and cornbread, jams, jellies and spotless china and silverware.
Cloth napkins that I swear she had starched.
And don’t drop anything on the floor!
She’d be on it...and you in an instant.
Billie and I were the kids.
The others were in their teens and older.
And on the occasion when friends were invited to Sunday dinner, Billie and I and any other small kids found us at a small table off to the side from the adults.
Same rules applied.
Don’t drop!


Both my sister and the oldest of my cousins (who was my sister’s age) were full of, as Aunt Mag would say, “The Devil.”
     Grace, the cousin was married and living in a house on the hill just above her folks’ place.
One year, she and my sister got together. Willie Mae had been to a novelty shop before her visit home.
She had bought fake dog do-do.
The two put it in the middle of Aunt Mag’s stretched tight and spotless bed cover.
And then feigned surprise, calling Aunt Mag:
“Look what that dog did!!!”
Aunt Mag took one look, dived for the broom and a startled little dog suddenly found that big broom was descending on him.
He took off for parts unknown.
He may not have ever been heard from again....
Aunt Mag and Mama were first cousins. Both last names, Patrick.
Aunt Mag met Uncle Will at Mama and Dad’s wedding.
I had all the childhood disease. Chickenpox, measles (German and domestic), whooping cough and rheumatic fever. The last sticks with me in that I can remember trying to bore my head through the bed headboard and Mama grabbing me, putting her chest between my head and the headboard and cushioning the blows I was inflicting on myself.
I know that must have hurt her.
But she held me until that phase passed.
And she was up all night with wet compresses and with
prayer....
    When it came to doctoring, we rarely saw a doctor.
    Mama was THE doctor.
    To this day, I can barely stand grape juice. I just don’t put myself in a position to drink any. Grapes are fine. But no grape juice.
    The reason?
    When Mama decided I needed a laxative, she put Epson Salts or Castor Oil in a glass of our homemade grape juice and made me drink it.
    And that flavor seems to linger in any grape juice I drink today.
    Some of Mama’s other remedies:
    Bad cold or fever?
    A pint of whiskey was kept in the kitchen cabinet. She’d take a spoonful in a glass, add some sugar, a bit of hot water and you had a hot toddy guaranteed to sooth that sore throat and lull you to sleep.
Then  she would fry up some onions for an onion poultice. Spread those onions on the chest, top the onions with a piece of flannel cloth and tie tightly.
    Cut yourself?
    Or maybe you have a boil starting to fester.
    Dad would put a new chaw of his Brown’s Mule in his mouth.
    He’d chew until it was good and moist.
    Then the brown, wet mess was spread on the cut or the boil and bandaged.
    And the “homemade” remedies seem to do their job.
    Our visits to a doctor were few. And never a hospital.
    But, while we lived at one of the many houses in Ada, Dad became very ill. He had spent two or three days in bed, only getting out to use the chamber pot under the bed.
    I think it was Ed who came by and saw Dad’s condition.
He found a telephone and called a doctor—I think he had gone to him a few times.
    And the doctor made a house call to take care of Dad.
    He came from Bluefield and risked his car on the old dirt road that ran near our house.
    There was no running to a drug store for medicine.
The doctor had medicine in that old familiar black bag.
    A dentist?
    We never went to one.
    Of course our teeth showed it.
    I think Mama had lost most of hers as had Dad.
    Mine?
    While in basic training in the Air Force, the dentist decided one of my teeth had to go.
    He was a major. I was a private.
    So the tooth would go.
    He shot in the Novocaine, but it really did little to deaden the pain. And he was having problems getting the tooth to leave my mouth. I was agitated to no end.
    So he had his nurse hold my arms while he parked his knee in the middle of my chest and yanked.
    I staggered out of the clinic and back to my barracks..still bleeding. I made it to my bunk and passed out.
    The next thing I knew, the drill sergeant was holding a bag of ice to my jaw.
    And he kept getting ice and refilling the bag until the bleeding finally stopped.
    That episode really soured me on dentists.
    For the next 30-plus years, the only time I went to a dentist was when a tooth absolutely had to be pulled. And I demanded to be put under.
    The result was a hurry up mouth makeover when I retired. I needed a lot of work and I was trying to get it while I still had insurance. Saving money had temporally cured me of my dentist fears.
    Turned out the thought was more painful than the work.
I met some nice people and had little or no pain as one dentist pulled 5 teeth, another did some surgery on my gums and the third made partials and has become my regular dentist. I see him every three months for a checkup and cleaning.
   
Speaking of prayer.
Mama was very religious.
It was probably one of the only things she demanded from Dad.
Her church going.
He would not go.
Don’t get me wrong.
He was the most religious man I have ever known.
But organized religion seemed to leave him cold.
I can remember most nights when I could hear him softly praying after the lamp had been put out and he was lying in the next room beside Mama.
But Mama and I would go to Sunday school and to church services.
And prayer meetings on Wednesday nights.
I have seen her praising the Lord and I have heard her
talking, as they say, “in tongues.
One Sunday, while we lived in North Tazewell, Dad finally gave in and said he would go with us to Sunday night services.
As we walked in he was in the middle, holding my hand and Mama’s when the preacher looked up and said: “Well, Mr. Moore, I’m glad you’ve finally decided to join us.”
Wrong words.
Dad turned on his heels, taking both of us with him.
He never set foot in a church again, not even when I had a part in a Christmas Pageant.
A religious man but one who could not tolerate the hypocrisy
that, even in the 30s and 40s, ran though the so -called servants of 
God....

My first brush with the “theater” came in church. I took
part in a Christmas pageant.
My part was to get up and hold up a child’s sock and say:
“My stocking is too small to hold a single toy, oh how I
wish I lived when Grandpa was a boy!”
And then I held up a large woolen sock that reached from the
top of my small frame to the floor.
Dad showed up to see me perform, but he stayed just inside
the cloakroom at the back of the church. And then he waited in
the cold outside to walk Mama and me home.

As a small child growing up in the narrow valley below a huge hill—too small for a mountain.... pastureland for the cows that both
my uncle and Dad had.
It  had several apple and cherry trees, not planted in
any particular order, almost as if somebody had come along and
thrown away apple cores and cherry pits as they dined on the
fruit.
And strawberries and blueberries.
It was a bountiful hill and Mama and I would pick the berries
and the fruit and each fall she would fill the old glass Mason
jars with jams and jellies and apple butter.
The apple butter was made in an oblong black iron kettle
that rested on a rock fireplace in the yard. It’s interior was copper coated.
This same kettle also served as a soap maker.
The lye soap that came from that kettle got the clothes
clean, but it could also leave your hands raw and red it was so
strong.
If there were just a few things to wash out, Mama would fill a
zinc washing tub (the same one used for bathing in the kitchen)
and take an old washboard and scrub the clothes by hand.
I don’t remember just when we got a washing machine. Of
course you then had to run the clothes through the wringer and
then hang them on the clothesline to flap in the breeze until
they were dry.

At least at this house we had electricity.
In future places we lived, right up through 1948, many of the houses were so far back in the hollows that there was no wires close by and we could not afford to pay to have the wire strung to the house.

My first day of school.

It stands out in a way. Perhaps because I’ve been told about
it...at least the enrollment part, so many times.
Seems in Virginia at that time, if you weren’t six by September, the start of the school year, then you had to wait until next fall to enroll and begin first grade.
My cousin Billie had just turned six and she was going to
school. I wouldn’t be six until December.
My sister, posing as my mother, went to school with me and assured the authorities I had turned six. She made up some excuse as to why there was no birth certificate. Of course then they were not as strict about such things.
And so my venture into academia began.

By this time Sister Willie Mae and brother-in-law Lewis were in Pounding Mill, so she visited more often. We had no car, Dad couldn’t drive and had no interest in learning, I’m told because of a bad experience.
Seems he bought a car years before when my sister and brother were small.
He decided he was going to take a trip, even though he had had no lessons.
So he talked a neighbor into going with him.
The neighbor, with misgivings, agreed, but with the words:
“Spot, it won’t do to fool with them things!”
Now the car only had a front seat with a sort of flat
luggage rack on the back. Brother Ed and the neighbor sat on the rack while Dad and Willie Mae sat up front.
They started out.
Dad lost control, stepped too hard on the gas, and the car
left the road and tried to climb right up the side of the brush covered hill
It stopped.
Dad and Willie Mae got out, shaken, but unhurt.
They looked for the two riding in the rear.
Here they came, out of a briar patch where they’d been
thrown.
The neighbor pulled out a thorn or two from his backside and
shook his head.
“See,” he said to Dad,” I told you it wouldn’t do to fool
with them things!”
And Dad heeded those words.
We did own cars over the years, but somebody else drove,
brother Ed, a neighbor...but not Dad.
Dad was a carpenter.
And a good one.
In the late 30s, he helped build most of the houses in what was known  as North Tazewell. But he didn’t got very little money—just wages. If any “big” money was made, that was Uncle Will’s department.
Uncle Will was the youngest of the three brothers, Uncle Oll
was next and Dad was the oldest.
Dad’s schooling didn’t go beyond the 4th grade. But he
picked up his carpenter’s trade from his father.
When the funeral was being preached for his father, he
didn’t attend. He was consoling himself in the father’s workshop
keeping busy at the turner’s trade, making buckets and barrels.
But despite the lack of formal education, if you wanted a house built, just tell him how many rooms, what frills you wanted and he would sit down, draw up a floor plan (nothing fancy) of the home and then figure up the material and tell you just what it would cost.
And when the house was built, with Uncle Will as the contractor, Dad would be there in his carpenter’s apron, hammering in the nails...at 50 cents an hour.

I think there were words between Uncle Will and Dad.
I can’t be sure.
But we moved about five miles away, up one of the hollows
north of Tazewell. It was more like a farm with a two-bedroom house, a barn and a chicken house and some land.
We kept a couple of hogs each year and those salt-cured hams would hang in old burlap feed sacks in the loft of the barn.
When we wanted meat, Dad would climb up and cut off a hunk.
And that salty ham was some of the best meat I have ever
eaten.
Sure, you drank an ocean of water afterwards, but that taste gets to you and even to this day, when I go South, I have that ham for breakfast if its on the menu.
And that’s the first place I can remember that I truly developed a child’s belief that Santa Claus really exits.
I went to bed and saw that Dad and Mama were sitting beside
the kitchen stove. Dad, as usual had a chew of old Browns Mule in the side of his cheek. Occasionally he would spit in the coal bucket sitting
beside the stove.
Mama was at the kitchen table cutting out pieces of cloth
from brightly colored feed sacks. These would eventually wind up in a quilt for the bed.
There was a noise in the living room.
And I jumped out of bed.
Mama and Dad got up from their chairs and the three of us
went into the living room.
And there, running around the Christmas tree, was a windup train, something I had always wanted.
True, it wasn’t electric, and it only had a small amount of
track. And, as I recall, the engine, two cars and a caboose.
But who had put it there?
It was not there when I went to bed.
I was sure it wasn’t Mama and Dad, cause they were in the kitchen and I could see them through my bedroom door.
I was sure that Santa Claus had done the deed.

It wasn’t long after that, that we moved again.
Farther away from Tazewell, about halfway between Tazewell and Bluefield, W.Va. The place was called Tip Top, Virginia. Dad bought an old two-story building that housed a general store that he operated.
We lived over the store.
And in the back was some sort of a building more like a long
low factory building than anything else.       
The whole complex was almost like a fort with the store building in front, the “factory” behind and a wooden fence on either side connecting the two.
Whenever I see the “Little Rascals” on TV, particularly the episode where Spunky,  Alfalfa and the  gang are putting on a variety show, I think of that “factory” behind the store because my playmates and I tried to do the same in that building.
As kids will, we tried to sell tickets, we were all enthused
and each wanted to be the star. Of course nobody wanted to come, anybody who was really interested was in the show.
So the show went on...for us.

And yet another of the moves, probably a year or less later, going north west again, this time between Tip Top and Bluefield
to Sinclair’s Crossing.
Here again, Dad bought a combination store and house right along side the railroad. The road ran on the other side and crossed the railroad near the store.
But in this deal, Dad also acquired a house and lot next
door...all part of the same property. We had lived there only a short time, when a neighbor on the other side of the house announced one day to Dad that the house and lot was really on his property and belonged to him.
He was consulting a lawyer.
Now Dad was an easygoing man. A gentle man.
But an Irishman with a bit of bulk on him.
And he could have a temper if the occasion arose.
He told the neighbor to get off “his property and stay off.”
The next day, the neighbor showed up at where he said the property line really started. He was pushing a wheel borrow with two large railroad crossties.
He announced he was going to fence in his property.
Dad blew up.
I think it’s about the only time I ever saw him really lose his temper.
His face got red as his  blood approached the boiling point.
He gritted his teeth and glared at the neighbor.
He wheeled his 55-year-old body around to the railroad ties.
He bent down and got one of the ties under his right arm
and the second under his left.
He picked them up, one under each arm, and walked upright
across the yard, across the road and threw the ties into the
ditch.
Then he wheeled around to confront the neighbor.
The fellow was nowhere to be seen.
He even left his wheelbarrow.       

Dad contacted the real estate agent, a friend of his, who has sold him the property.
The agent send out a surveyor. The survey showed the neighbor was wrong. A couple months later the neighbor sold his house and moved
on.....

I can’t remember what kind of school we had in Tip Top,
but at Sinclair’s Crossing, it was the old one room setup with grades one through six studying together.
Higher grades were bussed to West Graham, a few miles north.
And, eventually, that would be my family’s next stop.
But it was here at Sinclair’s Crossing that I first got to know my niece, Jackie.
Her parents were actually the brother and sister-in-law of
my brother-in law, Lewis. The parents had a bunch of kids. Lewis and Willie Mae had none. So Jackie was adopted by them.
The first time I saw her, she was in a wicker clothes
basket, a little bundle wrapped in a blanket.
Her real mother was with her.
And my memory of her real mother is that she showed she could be a tomboy...she came out into the backyard and passed an old football back and forth with me...

Next stop was West Graham, Virginia.
Dad bought an old two-story frame house that was no more than 50 yards from the railroad tracks.
There was a large ditch filled with water, a fence and about 25 yards of ground between the house and the tracks.
No running water (this was in the late 30s), no electricity,
no neighbors within a mile.
When the trains went by, and there were many, particularly those hauling coal from the mines, the rumbling and click-clack of the wheels hitting the rail joins reverberated through the air and sometimes the house would shake with the chug, chug, chug of the engine.
The smell of the burning coal that heated the boilers of these Stallions of the rails would fill the air and make your nostrils curl a bit. Magnificent machines rolling past.
And many times there would be the squeal of brakes, as the engineer realized he was heading toward the Bluefield railroad yards a few miles away at too fast a speed.
I walked to grade school a couple of miles away. Nothing happened there that was noteworthy, at least nothing that left enough of an impression to recall.
     But despite the trains (you got use to it and when something happened and none came by for awhile, THAT would awaken you the
stillness that wasn’t suppose to be) it was a time I could run and play cowboy and Indians (usually by myself), go up on the hill above the house and pretend I was attacking a fort (the house below) with a Daisy B.B. gun my brother had bought me.
He was living with us again, having quit his service station
job in Tazewell. He had taken over a small grocery store in
nearby Bluefield, VA.
He had an old Ford for transportation.
And that old Ford was good for more than that.
Since we had no electricity, we had no radio.
So Brother Ed would take the battery and the radio out of
his car, bring them into the house each night and we would listen
to the Shadow and Jack Armstrong, Jack Benny and All those good
old shows.
Of course, that would drain the battery.
But not to worry.
With the radio and battery back in the car, Ed would simply
turn the crank those old cars were equipped with.
This would be like pulling the starter cord on a lawnmower
these days.
Then he would go to work, leave the car running for awhile and by the time he returned for the night, the battery was ready to power the radio for us again.
But there was one difference in that old crank and the modern lawnmower starter cord.
It could kick back on you.
If it started and you didn’t let go right away and jump out of the way, you could get a broken arm.
Ed found this out one morning the hard way.
But we continued to enjoy the radio.

Living by the railroad tracks at that time when there were so many folks out of work and riding the rails, many would drop off near our house before the train got too close to the yards and they might run into railroad detectives who took a dim view of those riding a train without a ticket.
And these men with haunting eyes, most as skinny as one of
the rails they’d just left, would knock on our door and ask for
work in exchange for a little something to eat.
     Nobody was ever turned away.
Nobody.
Mama kept a big pot of bean soup (but mostly beans) on the back of the old wood cook stove. And there was plenty of cornbread and milk to go with it.
And word must have gotten around.
A good place to stop with folks who would feed you.
Somebody said they must have left a mark on the fence that
was recognized by fellow hobos.
But we could not find anything.
And Mama kept feeding them.      



But back to that BB gun Ed gave me.
When he had been drinking a bit too much, Ed could have a mean streak...not particularly malicious, but just trying to see how far he could push a person until he got them really angry.
Some of these times, he and Dad used to go at it tooth and nail—verbally—never physically...until Dad would get up (these usually took place around the kitchen table) and go outside on the porch, get out his knife and cut off a chew of tobacco from the plug he always carried. He’d pop that into his mouth and start chewing.
It seem to calm him down.
In the meantime, brother Ed would wander off to bed.
But I digress.
About the BB gun.
Ed was in one of those moods and picked on me...enough to send me out of the house in tears.
I had the BB gun with me.
I could hear Mama talking to Ed in the kitchen, telling him to leave me alone; he shouldn’t be picking on me.
Now there was a hole in the side of the house just big enough to stick the barrel of the BB gun through and still have enough room left to sight down the barrel.
The hole was behind the kitchen stove, so I could see my brother’s feet and ankles clearly as he stood beside the stove talking with Mama.
I pulled the trigger.
I heard the “Ouch!”
Only it was Mama who cried out.
Seems she had moved to the stove and was standing in just the right spot when I fired the gun.
I took off up the hill.
Ed came roaring out of the backdoor and right after me.
And he caught me.
He grabbed me roughly by the arm with a few choice cuss words.
And together we went into the kitchen to confront Mama.
I told her I was sorry, I wouldn’t do anything like that again, I promised.
Needless to say I lost use of the BB gun for a while.
And when Dad showed up, he got down the razor strap.

And it was at this house I first smoked...with a doctor’s blessing!
I had a cough.
And no matter what Mama tried, the cough would not go away.
The doctor we went to, prescribed smoking a pipe a couple times a day.
So Dad stopped on the way home and bought me a corncob pipe and a nickel bag of Golden Grain smoking tobacco.
You could put it in a pipe or roll your own cigarettes.
Boy, did I feel like I was grown up.
I must have smoked half of that bag of tobacco that afternoon.
And then I heaved half the night.
I think I turned my insides outside about three times.
But I continued to smoke...but not as much.
And the cough went away.
How long I smoked, I don’t recall, perhaps about 6 weeks.
And as soon as the cough left, so did the pipe.

Came time to move again.
I climbed the hill with Ed to watch for the moving van.
Everything was packed and we were ready to go.
Actually we were only going about four or five miles to another
house in West Graham, only this one was on a hill on the opposite
side of town.
And it had running water and electricity.
All at once Ed, who carried a bit more weight than he should
on his 5 foot, seven frame, stumbled and fell.
He rolled over and I looked down at him.
“Are you alright?”
He turned away and gagged and then began heaving and
heaving.
I didn’t know what to think or do.
After he had heaved a bit more, he wiped his mouth, turned
back to me and said:
“I swallowed that damn tobacco I was chewin’!”

Even though we didn’t move any great distance, it still meant another school change for me.
I did not go to one school for a full year until I was in the sixth grade grade and we had finally moved to Bluefield, W.Va.
But the new place in West Graham sat back on a hill at the end of the street. For this part of the country, it was not a steep hill, just gently rolling.
And again, we had a place to raise chickens, a big garden
and apple trees.
If you looked across the valley you could see the fledgling cemetery on a gently rolling hill…(that cemetery is the resting place today of most of my family).
And through all these moves, Dad was doing what he did best---building houses
He would come home at night exhausted, the smell of sawdust
and sweat mingled to attack your nostrils.
If he was late, Mama would feed the chickens.
But she would always have supper ready and the three of us would sit down to an evening meal...ham with hot biscuits, or maybe lima beans with cornbread.
And sometimes, just cornbread with homemade jam, jelly or
apple butter.
Or crumble it up in a bowl; pour on the sweet milk...food
for the Gods!!.

Mama sold the eggs to the little grocery store about a mile
and a half away.
But ever once in a while, she’d give me three eggs.
I would take them to that same store, and the grocer would give me an ice cream bar and a penny piece of candy. Six cents for the three eggs.

And it was here we lived when World War II began.
Looking back, I can’t recall just what we did when we heard the news. Nor can I recall where we were when we heard it.
I know Mama and I usually went to Sunday school and church.
The highlight I remember of the first year was that we tried to turn in anything that might help the war effort.
And that included tin cans.
In fact, the school had a drive. If you brought in a burlap bag full of tin cans you got a ticket to the movie theater.
I know I filled at least four sacks by having neighbors save them
for me.
And it was while we were living in West Graham that I saw my
first movie:   
 “Uncommon Glory” with Gary Cooper.
And I promptly fell in love with the movies and wanted to go to the matinees every Saturday.
And I did get to go quite often.
But a dime was a dime in those days.
And that was the admission price for a kid.
I would go in and see a comedy, a cartoon, a cliffhanger
serial and a feature...usually a cowboy picture Buck Jones, Tim
McCoy and Raymond Hatton...the three musketeers.
Dad would wander around town (Bluefield, Va.) and wait
for me to get out so he could walk me home.
If the movie was a good one, I’d sit through it for a second time, even though I knew Dad was going to be angry. On those occasions his would be a verbal lashing, not one with the strap.

And those movies almost cost me my life, or at least serious injury at an early age.
I was standing on the corner beside the bank building in Bluefield, Va., waiting for Dad to give me the 25 cents that would get me in the theater, buy a box of popcorn and a candy bar.
He handed it to me, and, I, being the kid in a hurry, wheeled around and rushed across the intersection...there was a squeal of brakes. I stopped and looked up.
The bumper was brushing my pants.
But I went on to the theater, leaving a shaken driver and a shaken parent to sort things out.
Of course I heard plenty about it after the show and on the way home.

Then came, yet another move.
This time to Ada, W.Va., about three miles from Bluefield and seven miles from the county seat, Princeton, W.Va.
A rural area, with a cluster of houses near the center of
attraction the railroad station and the plain white church with the tall steeple and the little general store in the flat-bottomed land that somehow stuck out like a sore thumb between the hills.
And it was to this store we moved, Dad bought it from an old fellow who had run it for years.
Bedrooms, living room and kitchen were in back.
The toilet was outside.
We were back to outdoor plumbing.
And off and on, Ada was to figure on my life for the next few years, since we lived in, as I can recall, at least five different houses there.
Ada was at the other end of the railroad yards in Bluefield.
It had a station and a stationmaster.
It had a section crew stationed there and whose duty was to
patrol the tracks in their section and make any repairs needed.
The story goes that Ada was once know as Long Falls, because
a cow atop one of the hilly pastures, lost her footing and tumbled all the way down to the bottom.
Later a new stationmaster took over the train station.
He had a little daughter, Ada.
And he renamed the town after her.
Since he ran the town, nobody objected.
There were no councilmen, no policemen, and no firemen.
But there was a two-room school.
And this was next to the last year it would operate; the kids were to be bused to Bluefield schools after it closed.

You might say my early years mostly revolved around the
vicinity of Ada even though we moved away, we always came back.
There were three or four surnames that belonged to several families, all related by marriage.
Patriarch was the old man Roland. He and his wife lived in the big white house about a mile and a half down the valley from our store.
There was a pasture to the left of his house and on the edge of the pasture was a new house. A daughter had married a fellow named Sparks and this was their house.
Up on a bluff overlooking the valley was another Sparks, related to the guy who had married the Roland girl.
Across the creek in the valley that parallel the road, was another house, this time it belonged to a Roland son. He had a son who I got to know, and who I ran around with.
Farther down the road and up a hollow was the Lawson clan,
three houses close together and several kids in each family.
And up the road that ran by our store and up one of hollows, lived the Mayberry’s.
What I remember the most about that first home in Ada, was the last day of school when the pasture at the Rolands became a playground and festival site.
Everybody showed up for games...and food.
Mostly food. Everything you could want.
Meat, vegetables, breads of all kinds.
And cookies and pies and cakes.
A celebration of the end of school and looking toward a
beautiful summer.

It’s funny how, years later, you just aren’t sure of the chronology of events in your life.
Somewhere along the line, we wound up across East River Mountain in Bland County, Va...up a hollow called Laurel Creek.
Again without running water, without electricity. And without transportation unless a neighbor gave you a ride or you took the school bus or walked.
Folks were allowed to ride the school bus to Rocky Gap and back home again.
Dad would get on the bus, go to Rocky Gap, and catch the Greyhound for Bluefield on the other side of the mountain.
He’d get back in time to catch the school bus home.
What he was doing at this time to bring in money to feed Mama and I, I have no idea. I do know he did carpenter work and farmed the few acres we had.
I think I must have been in the fourth or fifth grade or maybe the beginning of the sixth when we lived there.
I went to Rocky Gap school, which included all the grades.
One incident that stands out in my memory was the day I ran away from school for home and the principal came after me in his car, made me go back to school and sit in a classroom with a jaw the size my fist.
It started when some kid threw an ice ball and hit me in the side of the face.
I tried to get help from a teacher, but she ignored me.
So that’s when I took off.
And we lived 10 miles away.
The principal berated me for leaving the school grounds...that WAS just not allowed. He said nothing about my aching and swelling jaw.
Just ignored it.
He would not take me home, but back to school and I had to sit there the rest of the afternoon until time for the school bus.
This was another time I saw Dad almost speechless with rage.
But by the next morning, he had calmed down.
Nevertheless, he took the school bus to Rocky Gap the next morning while I stayed home with a jaw that prevented me from barely opening my mouth.
He returned later, having gotten a ride from a neighbor.
All he said to me was:
“You’ll have no more problems at that school.”
And he was right.
For the rest of the time I attended, the principal and the teachers were friendly, even downright kind to me.
Another memory of Laurel Creek....
It was Christmas Eve and snowing those big snow flakes that pile up in a hurry.
And cold.
Brother Ed was living across the mountain in Bluefield, Va., and running a little grocery store.
He decided he wanted to spend Christmas day at home with the folks, so Christmas Eve he caught the Greyhound in Bluefield, W.VA.
When the Greyhound got to the crest of East River, Ed got off.
If, through the trees and the dense growth and rocky ledges, you managed to climb down the mountain, you would be smack-dab across the creek from our house.
And in good weather, as far as I know, nobody had ever tried it.
It was at least a three-mile descent.
But Ed did it.
With a little help from a friend....John Barleycorn.
A couple of bottles were tucked safely inside his heavy overcoat pocket so they wouldn’t break when he fell.
And fall he did.
Said he’d walk 10 feet and then slide and fall and roll 40.
He’d catch onto a tree trunk or a bush—or they would catch onto him.
He’d lie there for a few seconds to take inventory to see if everything was intact—especially his friend.
He’d take a swig from one of the bottles, recork it, tuck it back in its safe haven and get back to his feet.
By the time he reached the bottom of the hill, he’d lost one of his friends...the one that became empty as it fortified his descent to the bottom of the mountain.
He knocked on the door about 1 a.m. in the morning, battered and bruised and covered with snow.
But feeling no pain.

While I’m on the subject of my brother, I recall another incident with him.
He could be kind...and most of the time he was. But he could also be mean and vindictive, as we all can, when something rubbed him the wrong way, he’d had a bad day or mostly, a bit too much of the old booze.
This happened when we lived in a third house in West Graham, VA.
When Ed ran a gasoline station, it was for Shell Oil.
And he had one of those military-style caps with the Shell Oil emblem.
He had long since quit that job, but I found the cap somewhere one day and was wearing it, pretending to be, probably, a soldier.
He came into the room and yelled at me about the cap.
He grabbed it off my head, opened the door of the old pot-bellied heating stove in the living room and threw the cap inside to feed the fire.
Of course I was heart-broken.
And Mama wasn’t too happy, either and told Ed so.
Ed stormed out of the house.
When he came home, I was asleep.
But the next day, he made amends.
He took me up town...to Bluefield, W.Va.,and outfitted me from head-to-toe that included a suit and tie.
Thinking back now, and knowing he rarely had much money at any one time, he must have charged it and paid it off over the months ahead.

It was at this house which sat just off the main street (of course, the street was parallel to the railroad) that I got my first taste of a traveling carnival.
The carnivals would set in a vacant lot next to the creek that ran beside the railroad.
I wasn’t allowed to go alone.
Dad took me.
It was fascinating, but I’m afraid I just looked at all the rides after going only on the merry-go-around, one of those old-fashioned kind with the carved wooded horses dancing their way around in the circle to the loud tunes of the carousel’s music maker.
One ride was all it took.
Cause I got sick.
To this day, I have never been one for those rides.
I have tried the Ferris wheel, and, of course, the bumper cars, but even the Merry-go-rounds get a wide berth.

Here came another move.
This time South to Bluefield, W.Va.
At that time Bluefield was a bustling, noisy hub of the coal fields...every store filled, three theaters, two hotels and J.C. Penny’s, Sears...a large train station.
Trains moved in and out of the railroad yards day and night filled with the black ore dug from the surrounding mountains.
Saturdays, the town filled with farmers and miners and railroad
men.
We moved to a two-story house on the North side.
A street angled about 45 degrees led up the mountainside and then another street intersected and ran to the right. Our house was the second one from the intersection, situated on a flat area. But behind the house, the mountain again started its climb.
At the foot of the mountain were the railroad yards and the roundhouse for train repairs.
Along the street that parralleled the railroad yards were more house and a small store building.
Brother Ed and Dad operated it together.
They got along together but, as I’ve said before,  loved to argue.
And Ed hit the booze pretty good. So a few good belts and he
was raring for an argument.
But all, in all, they got along.
And of course, I loved this store business. I had just about all the pop and candy I wanted. I was rarely turned down.
The war didn’t touch us that much. Of course rationing came about, and the draft, but Ed was classified 4F and wouldn’t have to go.
And I was too busy being a kid to worry about what was going
on in the world.
Here was an ideal place for play.
I had a play yard as big as all outdoors.
The mountain that began behind our house.
A play yard that echoed with yells and cries and sounds of
children during the day as the side of the green leafed mountain
came alive.
A perfect place for the Saturday matinee crowd that was growing up on Tarzan and cliffhanger serials and the blazing cowboy guns of Gene Autry and Buck Jones and Tim McCoy.
That big oak about halfway up was the perfect place for an ambush.
Thirsty?
A mountain spring welled up somewhere above and the thin trickle of water down the gully was clear and pure, sweet to the taste.
Shootout among the rocks?
Three quarters of the way up rock ledges covered with moss and scrub pine made a formidable hiding place from which a cowboy could take aim and when the foe “rounded the bend: “CAPOW”….
“You’re dead. I got you.”
“Naw, you missed me!”
And he was off behind another rock.
Above the rocky ledges you reached the top.
On that summit there were two huge electric signs, one
for the electric company, the other for Sunbeam bread.
Nobody went near them.
It was rumored if you touched one, you were liable to have 10,000 volts drop you on the spot.
And nobody in our crowd was about to test the rumor.
So we gave the signs wide berth.
But on cloudy overcast days, the top of the mountain surely
reached the sky.
For the sky came down to kiss it with the clouds and mist.
And when the morning sun had burned off the haze, the town spread out before you for miles, it seems the houses and buildings, the streets are just miniatures and this makes for another game.
That’s Bluefield Avenue down there. There’s where Aunt
Stella and Uncle Oll live.
On the other side of town another mountain green but almost
blue since it appeared so far away.
And then there were the crabapple trees.
They grew wild on the mountainside, beautiful in the spring,
and once their fruit appeared, a new game in this big backyard.
A slender, long branch some might call it a switch, trimmed to a point, stick a crab apple on the end, flick your wrist and you send that apple hurling through the air at your opponent.
Sometimes that opponent had a shield made from an old piece
of tin roof found lying around.
At other times, the only defense was to duck behind a tree, or a rock and hope for the best.
Or run through the brush.
But this could also be a place of solitude.
Find a clearing, lie back on the ground and listen to sounds. The birds singing, somewhere a woodpecker with his rata¬tattata, a movement in bushes close by probably a raccoon, or a rabbit. Big game bears and the such have long since departed these parts.
And above, a hawk circles looking for his morning meal.
 Here the sounds of the town were background noises, here those would be blotted out, with only the shrill train whistle piercing the dream of another day.

Our immediate neighbors at the North Side home was a family
that had three boys, one my age, on the right. We played together
most of the time.
Above and to the left where another street cut in and dead-ended was a black train porter and his wife.
To the right was a family by the name of Williams. He was a
brakeman on the railroad. They had  a son, Don, again about my age.
Don and I also paled around. He had a cleft palette, so was
a bit hard to understand until you got used to hearing him.
He and I would go to the railroad commissary at the railroad
yards for his mother.
She’d give us a book of railroad script usually five or ten dollars worth and a grocery list.
Whatever was left over, we could keep.
There was usually at least a dollar left, so we could buy pop and candy and gum.

It was the kid on the other side who introduced me to wine.
His father kept a keg of wine in a back room.
One day the son decided we should have some of the wine.
So he climbed through a window into the storage room and brought
back two glasses full.
Needless to say we both ended up sick.
Dad took his razor strap to me.
And the kid’s dad did likewise.       

Razor strap?
Yes. Razor strap.
When Dad figured I needed it, I got it. A couple of swats across the behind.
And what a strap.
It was about 4 inches wide, 3 feet long, one piece of worn leather, nicked in places where he had come down at too much of an angle when he was sharpening his old straight razor on it.
And it stung.
Boy, did it sting.
Made you think twice about repeating whatever you were being
punished for.
I don’t know what happened to that strap.
But I still have the razor.
    (Now Mama would punish me once in awhile…but she’d use a switch pulled from a nearby bush. And she was a bit gentler.)      

Actually, when I think back on those days, they were perhaps among the most pleasant and happy days of my life.
That was before the pressures began, that was when I was still a kid.
And I only had kid problems.
At that time I became aware that there were other folks in the world who weren’t exactly the same shade as me.
Sure I had seen these folks in the movies, and had probably seem them walking around the streets.
But the first impression of blacks came at the house on North Street.
This was before integration and Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Act.
The family that lived to the left of our house—a nice house on the hillside with a nice garage, was black.
They had no children.
A black man and his wife.
He was a porter on the Northfork and Western Railway.
And as far as I can recollect, nobody in our neighborhood said   anything one way or the other about his or her color.
They came and went without incident.
He would mow his lawn (the part that wasn’t straight up and down) on weekends, or he would work on his car.
His wife baked cookies.
And the kids in the neighborhood shared in them.
No word of different...of color was heard.

I learned to ride a bicycle here.
And you have never learned to ride a bicycle, unless you’ve learned on the hillsides that make up Bluefield, W.Va.
As you went down a hill (you couldn’t avoid “em) your heart was just about neck level and ready to jump out of your mouth.
Ed and Dad ran a little store at the bottom of  the hill...that was the intersection of Roanoke Street and Floyd.
Of course this was long before the modern-day supermarkets and discounts.
It was the day of the Mom and Pop stores, candy, pop, potatoes and canned goods, cigarettes and cigars...and credit.
Neither  Ed nor Dad could refuse somebody with a hard-luck story.
Laid off?
Out of work?
Sick?
They were both an easy touch.

It was at this address, I encountered the bullies.
They were pussycats compared to today’s crop.
More than once I would be on my way home from school, when one or more would try to pick a fight with me.
I wouldn’t fight, so I wound up running for my life.
More than once I would come to the “pit.”
Now the pit was  man made, with no shrubby … at one time a gravel pit.
But I would be forced over the edge where I would slide all the way to the bottom and , of course, come up with a few bruises and scraped skin.
But thankfully, after a couple of weeks or so, they found others to pick on and I was left alone.
This was the first school I went to for a whole year.
I don’t recall details of the school or the classes. But I was made a  crossing guard for a while.
This was the 6th grade which would have made me about 12.

Which means I had discovered there was a  difference between boys and girls.
I found I could retreat into my own little world with whomever I choose.
At that time there was a friendly girl in the 6th grade whom I can only describe as having Snow White qualities...black hair, white, white skin, blue eyes,   and kind words for everybody.   
But my fantasies with her never strayed to the stuff you see today.
It was fantasy that ended with a kiss.
That was extent of what I could imagine with the opposite sex in those days.

So I survived grade school and was ready for junior high.
    We never took a vacation. A Sunday trip maybe to visit relatives, but that was about it.
    Brother Ed used to drive us to Wytheville, Va. for a visit to some of Mama’s relatives. A wild trip in those days since it was two lanes up the mountains and down.
    But we would get visitors. Ed and his wife Daisy and Willie Mae and Lewis from Cincinnati (had to be late 30s).
    And Mama’s sister, Lula Criger and her daughter Margaret.
    You know what sticks in the memory on those visits?
    Margaret and her demands on her mother.
    Of course her mother seem to dote on her.
    But one of the things Margaret demanded at breakfast:
    Fried eggs—but with the yoke dipped out after frying.
    No, just frying the whites wouldn’t do. She wanted the whole eggs and then Aunt Lula had to carefully dip out the yoke.
    Later, after Margaret married, one of her daughters, Pat, remembers visiting us as a child. Pat and I email a bit—she and her husband live in Mississippi.
    Two other visitors—these when we lived on the North Side in Bluefield—were two cousins—brothers—of Mama. They were on their way to somewhere from somewhere. They always carried a couple or three guitars and such. And they’d play a tune or two for us.
    They would spend a night or two and then leave.
    On one such visit, they gave me a mandolin.
    That was like giving an anvil to a drowning man.
    I was not musically inclined.
    And never could learn a note on anything.
    Even the piano.
    A couple of times we moved to houses where the folks before us had the old player pianos. They were usually too heavy and difficult to move,
    I could load one of the paper rolls and turn the machine on and let it play a tune, but I personally couldn’t get a good note out of it.
    And when I went out for band, I wound up at the “gofer” guy.
    I really don’t know how many brothers and sister Mama had.
And I don’t know the first name of her father and mother.
    I do recall one of those detective-police pulp magazines that flourished in the late 30s and 40s that had a cover story and photos on the double murder of a couple in Missouri.
    A man and woman. The man was Mama’s youngest brother.
    Grandfather Patrick moved from Virginia to Missouri. How many times he was married is unclear, but I think it was at least three.
    As a boy, I had an address of a cousin in Galena, Mo. And we became pen pals. But as we both grew older, the letters ceased and we went our separate ways.
    On the other side of the family—Dad’s…nobody seems to know the first name of his father and mother. Birth certificates were either not issued—(home births)—or were lost.
    The practice was to write such information in the family Bible. But if one existed, no one knows it’s whereabouts.
   
Among the hazards I had faced:
A lighting strike.
I  was on my way to the store at the bottom of the hill.
The sky was black, but the rain was still in the clouds, so I figured I had enough time to  get to the store and hoped brother Ed will give me a bottle of  pop.
I had just turned the corner from my street into Floyd when the next thing I knew, there was a brilliant flash of light that hit the tin roof a garage about 20 feet away and then bounced.
I was knocked to the ground and felt something go through my body...a tense, warm sensation.
I lay there for a couple of minutes as the rain started.
I got to my feet and ran as fast as I could to the store at the bottom of the hill.
When I got inside, Ed took one look at me and realized something was wrong.
He helped me to a seat, all the time, asking:
“What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”
He gave me that bottle of pop right then and there.
I tried to speak, but found I couldn’t.
He later told me that my face was chalk white when I came in.
And eventually, I was able to  get out the fact that lightning had come awfully close to ending my life.

And since we’re talking of my brother at this point, I might point out that in later years Mama told me Ed wanted to adopt me.
That’s in the early years, when I was a baby and he and his first wife,
Daisy, were together.
And I’ll admit I have thought about that.
How would my life have been different?
But more importantly, would his and  Daisy’s ?
Would they have stayed together, would....?
But that’s all predicated on that big second guess that confronts us all.
IF...IF...IF...

An added note about this address:
Uncle Oll and his family lived on Floyd Street, just three or four houses up from the store. Where they moved from I don’t really remember, but just a note or two about them.
They didn’t get along with their neighbors and there were continual  fights.
They had a bunch of kids, but I must confess, I can’t remember how many.
Or can I.
There was Elizabeth, Charlotte, Rebecca, Grace, Britton and Homer.
Mama swore to the day she died that when one of the cousins was visiting, the cousin stole her solid gold wedding ring from the dresser drawer she had placed it in since it didn’t  fit  anymore.
It was while the uncle was living on Floyd Street that one of the girls met a fellow who delivered ice.
They were married.
And somewhere along the line, Britton found a girl he married.
She was, what you might say, the most outgoing person you would want to meet.
Where Britton was quite and reserved a bit, she was brash and outspoken.
When their first child was born, somebody asked:
“Does Britton claim it as his own?”
Britton was blind in one eye, the result of a childhood accident in which one of his sisters threw a wire of some kind in the air and it landed in his eye.
But in the latter stages of World War Two he was drafted and sent to the New England coast...as a spotter for enemy aircraft.
He mostly drove a taxi after getting out of the service.
When he wasn’t “under the weather.”
I used to see him often on the streets, especially after I returned to Bluefield to work on the newspaper.
And he would hit me up for a quarter or two.
For a bottle or two of beer.
His heart gave out one night as he was climbing the steps to where he and his wife and family were living.
The next thing I heard was that his wife married a guy I used to go to school with from Ada.
This guy was shy.
How shy?
He never talked on the school bus. He would not look you straight in the eye.
You never heard a bad word from teacher or student.
He was just part of the woodwork, the bus seat...he was invisible.
But a nice guy.

Junior High started.
The school...Ramsey...was located on a steep (what else) street. It was across from the hospital and next to the hospital was the local daily newspaper plant.
The next building down from the school was the public library.
I can recall the principal’s name: Mr. Stowers.
He was also a Scoutmaster.
A graying man with a line or two in a very pleasant face, his eyes seem to say he cared about you, you and you as he looked through the metal framed glasses.
It’s been years, but I can only recall him fondly...as one who cared about each and every student that attended his school.
He was not there to operate a factory to turn out junior high school graduates, he was there to help, to protect, to guide, to counsel, to be a father figure to each person who passed through those front doors.
I got to know the man when I joined the Boy Scouts and when we moved back to Ada, I had part of his troop there.
When we moved back, I got three or four of the other boys around Ada to join the Scouts, and we would hold our one meeting once a week and then try to get to Bluefield once a month for the main scout troop.
Our meeting place was an empty house one of the neighbors allowed us to use.

And it’s funny what sticks with you...not the meetings and the guys themselves.
But  Dad’s watch.
He carried a 17 jewel Elgin-railroad style pocked watch.
And he would let me have it so I would know when it was time to adjourn the scout meetings.
Boy, was I proud!!
That beautiful watch and I got to carry it.
I’d pull it out every few minutes and look at the white face with the black numbers and the slender black hands. The tiny minute hand revolved in the lower part of the watch..almost as if it was a timepiece unto itself.
And, as seems to be my luck, I slipped and fell, right on the pocket in which I had the watch.
The watch was wounded very badly.
Almost as bad as the hurt I felt inside.
But Dad was understanding.
He seem to know the hurt I felt,  here he had let me use one of his most prized possessions, and I wasn’t able to take care of it.
He just said:
“Accidents will happen, son, accidents will happen.”

Perhaps this is a good place for an aside on these two lovely people who called me their son---not by chance---but by choice.
Mama, at least while I was growing up, seem to depend entirely on Dad, on his decisions, on what he wanted for supper, what he wanted to do.
Her life revolved completely around him and her family—me.
But she could be firm with him if the need arose.
In his early years, after they were married, he was a bit of a boozer.
And she put her foot down, telling him she would leave him if he didn’t stop his drinking.
And he did.
There was always a pint bottle of whiskey in the kitchen cabinet.
But it was for medical purposes only.
Even brother Ed knew to leave it alone.


Dad didn’t believe in banks.
I suppose that came from the crash of 1929 when the banks failed and a lot of  people lost their money.
When he brought home a pay packet from a carpenter job, he would hand it to Mama.
And if he needed money for something, he would go to her.
She had one of the nickel Golden Grain tobacco bags in which she kept the bills.
And that was securely fasted around her middle with a heavy string.
Dad kept a record of everything he spent...down to the last penny.
He’d take out what was left of one of those square carpenter’s pencils, stick the lead in his mouth and then write down in a little tablet, the money he had spent that day and each item it bought.
We had a charge account at the local grocery and I was allowed to charge a candy bar or two a week.
I usually settled on a box of raisins, instead.

We usually had a flock of chickens when we lived out in the country.
The feed for the chickens (and for the two cows we had) came in colorful sacks.  And Mama would take those sacks and make her dresses from them.
What she didn’t use for dresses, she kept for quilt pieces.
But Dad considered each of those chickens a friend.
He could not bear to eat one himself, but he never said a word to Mama when, while he was gone, she would go out into the yard, grab one of the chickens by the neck, twirl it around a couple of times and it was history.
Then she’d dip it in hot water, pluck the feathers, open it up and take out the insides, cut it up and pop it into a hot pan on the old wood-burning stove.
But she’d have to fix something else for Dad.
He would not eat the chicken.

When it came time in the fall to slaughter the two pigs we kept, he could not bear to hear their death squeals.
So he would take me with him to the springhouse—a little house with a long concrete basin in which water flowed from the spring at the foot of the hill and out the other side.
This is were we kept our milk and butter cold—by setting the containers in the basin and letting the cold, sweet spring mountain water gush around them.
In the springhouse, he’d put his fingers in his ears and close his eyes.
A neighbor would do the dirty deed on the poor pigs.
Once they were dead, he would come to the springhouse and inform Dad.
After that, Dad took over.
He  would help lower the carcasses into huge drums of boiling water and then scrape off the hair.
He would take one of the knives laid out for the occasion and cut and clean the carcasses with the best of  butchers.
He just couldn’t bear to see them die.   

He was a gentle man.
Take the time the dog we had, ran out  into the road  where Mama and Dad lived in Oakvale (I was in the Air Force at the time).
A car hit the dog.
Dad picked the animal up,  found a shoebox (it was a small dog) and put the body inside.
Then he dug a hole and buried the pet.
He went into the house and sat down by the kitchen stove (his favorite spot to sit and relax and chew his tobacco and spit in the coal bucket).
After a few minutes, he looked at Mama:
‘”Jennie, I wonder if that dog is really dead?”
He went outside, got his shovel and dug up the dog to make sure he had not buried the pet alive.
   

And how many times have I see him grab a dog that was “having a fit” and hold that dog tightly until the spell passed.
What those dogs had, I have no idea.
We probably have shots today that take care of that problem.
But then, we didn’t even need a license.
And the dogs were usually strays...dropped off by a passing car or one a neighbor didn’t want.
One such dog was a Collie that could have been Lassie herself.
A beautiful, smart dog that showed up at our door one day at the Ada address of the  moment.
And that dog became my companion as I roamed the hills around the house.
Once, the dog tried to attack a groundhog that had ventured into the yard.
The groundhog was winning.
But the groundhog didn’t count on Mama.
She seized a hoe standing against the house and with a couple of swift licks, dispatched the groundhog into groundhog heaven.
Or, I should say, into one of her pots.
She skinned it and did all that stuff you have to do with a wild animal and cooked it.
That was our supper that night.

Day-in-day out, week, month, year, she cooked three meals a day over those old wood-burning stoves, she did the washing, most of the time with a washboard in an old galvanized tub that doubled as a bathtub when it came time to take a bath.
She helped Dad milk the cow
, slop the pigs, feed the chickens, tend the garden, she canned the meat and the vegetables and the fruits, she made the old lye soap for the washing.
She was never sick.
If she was, she said nothing.
She was Mama


MORE ABOUT ADA--THE TOWN, THAT IS

    I don't really know what the attraction Ada held for Dad.
    Over the course of about 10 years, we lived in six different houses and not necessarily a move from one house in Ada to another, but a few months in Princeton, a few months in Bluefield.
    Now I'm really not sure of when we moved into what house there.
    The first, I do know, was the little store across the railroad tracks and the creek. The living quarters were attached to the store.
    Ada was a bunch of houses stretching for perhaps 5 miles on either side of two mountains. With few exceptions, most of the houses were built into the hillsides or sitting on sloping, almost level parcels before the mountains again began their steep angles.
    Then there was the house about a half-mile off the main road.
    This was one of those where the land flattened out a bit before continuing on to the crest of the mountain.
    Here we had the pigs, two cows and chickens.
    How many of a night did I stay a bit longer that I was supposed to at a neighbor's house and had to travel that dark, deserted dirt road to my house.
    And it does get dark down there.
    Dark, dark.
    I could imagine all sorts of things after me.
    The trees lining the road became shadowy figures ready to pounce on me.
    And an animal movement in the brush would send me into high gear, so that when I reached the house my heart was pounding and my legs weak from the sudden burst of speed.
    It was here Dad borrowed a horse from a neighbor and began plowing the field above the house.
    I tried my hand and did a couple of furrows.
    But once the field was plowed, then came the planting.
    And after that the hoeing and weeding.
    But that garden helped us survive.
    The potatoes, the corn, the tomatoes, the beans.
     Dad would dig a hole in the garden, line it with straw and the potatoes harvested in the fall were put into the hole, covered with more straw and dirt.
    In the winter, you went to the mound, dug down and got the potatoes you need for the next meal.

    In the spring, the remaining potatoes would have started sprouts.
    We would slice them up and these went into the ground for a new crop of potatoes that year.
    Mama canned.
    Beans, tomatoes, corn.
    We had electricity at this house, but water came from the cool sweet spring that ran through the springhouse were the milk products were kept.
    The hams and bacon hung from the rafters, salt-cured for the winter.
    The sausage came from quart Mason jars....another canning job by Mama.   
    There also was a small orchard above the house...mostly apples.
    That provided a wealth of apple butter,  applesauce and jelly.
     Mama and I always went berry picking so should could turn those into jars of joy on a cold winter morning.
    One of the boys I ran around with was Burl Roland who lived at  the fork in the road where our dirt road and the main road met.
    He had a couple of shotguns, or at least his dad did, so we would go into the  woods hunting.
I don't think we ever fired a shot.
    We'd go squirrel hunting, and were lucky to see even a bird.
    Burt Burl's grandfather lived in the valley--what there was of it--and he had a couple of old work horses that he used to plow his fields.
    When they weren't being worked, they were turned out to pasture on the hillside.
    So Burl and I would find them and ride bareback.
    The old horses would put up only token resistance and then settle down to walk slowly, no matter how much you dug  your heels into their sides.
    We had to be careful where we rode the animals.
    His grandfather would have taken a hickory switch to both of us if he'd found out.

    It was in Ada that I had my first ride on a motorcycle.
    A big old hog--a Harley.
    The  neighbor at the bottom of the hill was into motorcycles in a big way--when he wasn't driving a truck.
    He got me up behind him one day and took off.
    I just closed my eyes and prayed.
    I knew at that moment, motorcycles and me just didn't get along.
    Then there was the house straight down in a hollow from the main road...that was after the main road climbed and twisted and turned at a 45-degree angle for three miles.
    The first pullover on the highway overlooked the house below.
    It's a miracle that some car didn't come plunging down the mountain and land on top of the house.
    Then, another house, about two miles further on, only you couldn't get to this one on the main road.
    You had to start in Ada and take a bone bouncing, teeth chattering dirt and rock road and then across the railroad tracks.
    It was no more than a three-bedroom house.
    But when Dad sold it, he sold it to a family of 21.
    Yes, 21.
    And 17 of the children were still living at home!!
    Next came the house in the bottoms, about a half a mile further down the road, only on the other side of the tracks...between the tracks and the creek.
    No electricity OR running water.
    And as for school?
    Well, I had to walk to Ada and take the school bus to Bluefield.
     These last two places were at least two miles from the bus stop.
    So each morning I would set out, walking along the railroad tracks to the bus stop.
    There I would board the school bus and it would take us to Ramsey Junior high and later Beaver High school.
    In the evening, it would pick us up at the schools, but then take us across town to the south side and a junior high there, where we would have to wait on another bus.
    This bus was taking students to another rural section of the school district.
    Then it would come back and pick us up and take us to Ada.
    Therefore, I would leave home at  6:30 a.m. and get back home about  7 p.m.
    And in the winter?
    I rarely missed school regardless of snowfall.
    I found the best place to walk was on the rails of the roadbed themselves.
    They were clear of show, and after a while, you developed a knack of staying on the rails and only slipping off occasionally.
    Then came yet another house in Ada.
    This one was in what passed as the middle of town.
    By this time, a new highway had been put through--by convict labor.
    So the main road ran above this house, which was situated, between the highway and the railroad.
    We were close to the train station.
    The house near us was owned by the railroad, but was the residence of the section foreman.
    In those days, the work crew that kept the tracks and roadbed in repair, had a section assigned. Thus a section crew and a section foreman.
    This foreman lived in house with his daughter, Lois, who was in her teens.
    `She wasa bit on the heavy side.
    A lovely person, a great friend.
    (She married a friend of the guy who gave me the motorcycle ride. And in later years she lived in the same area as Willie Mae and I went to see her.  She had had a stroke shortly before that.
    (She threw her arms around me like a long-lost sister.  She has since passed on.)
    But I would go to her house every chance I got. She was a friend and that was all there was...nothing else ever crossed my mind.
    But her dad was afraid people would begin to talk.
    So my visits dwindled.

MY FRIEND, BILLY BURKETT:

    Somewhere along the way in junior high or maybe it was senior high, I met  Billy Burkett.
    A little on the short side, he walked with a limp because of a defect at  birth.
    We became fast friends.
    He and his sister, Sue lived with their Aunt and Uncle Burton on the West End of Bluefield. The Uncle worked for the railroad, and had lost both feet when he had an accident involving a train.
    He had prosthesis that helped him get around almost as good as a man who still has both his natural feet. And he was still working.
    In later years, when I returned to Bluefield after my stint in the Air Force, I taught him to drive. Now you have never lived (or been so scared in a car) when you get a guy in there who has two wooden feet, literally.
    What he really needed was hand controls.
    But he was determined.
    And after several days of pushing too fast on the gas, letting the clutch out too fast, or too slow, and stepped on the brakes for a fast, screeching stop, he began to get the feel of the car (which was his. He had purchased it so Billy could learn to drive. I taught Billy first).
    Mr. Burton took his driving test and passed it.

    The aunt was an outgoing matronly person who treated me like a son.
    Many nights I spent at her house with Billy.
    We played together and planned our future together.
    Billy wanted to become a lawyer.
    I decided I would become one, too and we would open a law firm together.
    Billy was a year ahead of me in school,  so he graduated a year before me, the top of his class.
    He went on to West Virginia University, studied law and became a lawyer in Princeton, W.Va.
    And I became a journalist.
    So much for childhood dreams.
    Billy had to drop out of school after the first or second year because he was on the verge of a breakdown and exhaustion from his studies.  And of course, maintaining straight A's.
    He came home and worked for a year for the water department, before going back and finishing and getting his law degree.
    In the process, he acquired a wife.
    That happened when he and four other students were on their way back to school from a weekend at home and were in an automobile accident.
    One of the students had a sister, a redhead named Jetty, who visited him in the hospital and the next thing your know, she's the new Mrs. Burkett.
    I saw them off and on over the years, stopping whenever we visited Mama and Willie Mae in Bluefield.
    And they came to see us once when we lived in Grove City.

   

    But back to the aunt and uncle.
    They figured in my plans right up until the time I joined the Air Force.
    Of course Billy was at the university then.
    But the aunt and I had planned that I would return to high school that January and take the three credits I need to graduate.
    Since the folks were in Ada, I would stay at the Burton house during school.
    That way I could keep the job I had in the mailing room of the Bluefield Daily Telegraph.
    In return for room and board, I have to help around the house and yard and do whatever chores need to be done.

    As I grew up I was trying to write stories.
    I also tried my hand at crude cartoons.
    And, the stories involved a detective agency, and I peopled those  stories with my classmates and, of course, Billy.  We were partners in the agency.
    I probably wrote a dozen or so--on an old typewriter that had come with the first store Dad bought in Ada.
    I was on the yearbook staff in high school, but selling ads.
    The same with the high school newspaper.
    I took a journalism course in high school, but I can't remember anything about it.
Course, that's when the teacher sent us out to sell ads.
    But it was out of this writing that a most disturbing thing took place while I was in the service.
    Billy and I were corresponding on a sort of regular basis.
    And I received a story from him that he said he had written.
    It was called "The Windego" or something like that and as far as I can recollect, it was about a moose like creature in the north woods.
    It was great.
    I decided to write a sequel.
    I wrote it and sent it to him.
    And then, one evening I was browsing in the base library and just by chance picked up a book of short stories.
    The hair stood up on back of my neck when the book fell over to one of  the stories.
    The title: The Windego.
    I couldn't believe it.
    But I looked at it again.
    I checked out the book and went back to the barracks.
    I found the story Billy had written.
    It was the same word-for-word.
    I never said a word to Billy. I never let it be known that I knew the story was not original.
    And this is the first time I've revealed it to anyone.
    Why did he do it?
    I've often wondered.
    Perhaps it was because he was envious of my writing and wanted to show me that he, too, could write a story.
    A few years ago, we went through Princeton and I looked in the phone book for Billy's number.
    He was not listed.
    I hope one day to find out what happened.
    It's as if he dropped out of sight. He was a member of a successful law firm.
    He was a lifelong friend, one of those people you have a special bond with.
    (A few years ago, I found Billy’s address in Princeton while on the Internet. I called the phone number and his son answered. He said his mom and dad were in Maryland staying with his sister. He gave me the number.
    I talked to Jettie. Turned out Billy had had a stroke and was confined mostly to a wheelchair.
    We arranged to visit Jettie and Bill on our next visit to Kathy’s in Maryland. And had a happy reunion—yet a bit on the sad side.)
   

DROPOUT

    When my senior year of school started, I needed only three credits to graduate.
I was still working at the Daily Telegraph and we had gotten a 50 cents an hour raise.
    That came about because we all got together one Saturday night and decided we would strike. We would refuse to handle the papers.
    I felt sorry for Mr. Melchior, the mailing room foreman. He was such a nice guy and he really was caught in the middle.
    But when the presses started about midnight, the papers came up the conveyor and right off onto the floor because nobody made any move to "fly the press."
    Mr. Melchor called the pressroom and the presses groaned to a halt.
    The press foreman  and  some of the pressmen came up.
    So did some of the editorial staff and the composing room.
    There was a union of sorts in the composing room. And I think one in the pressroom where pressmen also doubled as stereotypers (casting the pages into metal plates to fit on the presses.)
    But the nephew of the owners headed the union in the pressroom. So  essentially it was a company union.
    Somebody had called the business manager, who also was a member of the owning family.
    We presented our demands and, surprise, he agreed to them.
    Course, I don't think anybody in the mailroom had had a raise in years.
    You did get a couple of dollars more as you took on more responsibility...I was making more operating the mailing machine than "flying the press."
    I wanted to keep this job, but I wanted to go to school a half-day. that way I could go home in the afternoon and sleep, catch the last bus to  Bluefield and then go to school after work.
    The principal wouldn't hear of it.
    If I didn't want to take more than the three credits I needed, then I could just sit in study halls for three periods.
    And If  I needed shoes or clothes, or, for that matter, food, there were government agencies out that that would take care of that for me.
    I was now 17.
    So I told him what I thought of  him and the system, went to my locker, cleaned it out and went home.
    I walked in the door and told the folks  that I had quit school.
    And I caught very little negative response from them.
    Mama hoped that I'd eventually change my mind.
    But other than a few words, they backed me all the way.
    I set out to earn money with a vengeance and to fill in the hours I now had on my hands.
    I caddied at the country club, I sold soft drinks at the minor league baseball park and I shoveled coal into basements for a couple of bucks a ton.
    (The Melchoir son who gave me a ride to Ada, also hauled coal. And the way Bluefield is situated, most of the time he couldn't get the load into the basement. So he would tell the homeowner he knew of someone would  shovel it into the basement.
    (Most of the time I had to fill a wheelbarrow with coal and then dump it in a coal bin through a basement window.)
    All this time, I still worked at the paper and attended my National Guard sessions.
    It wasn't unusual for me to caddy in the morning, shovel coal in the afternoon, sell at the ballpark in the evening and then work at the paper in the early morning, catching a nap whenever I could.
    I realized I was getting nowhere.
    Something had to give.
    I was going to have to find a fulltime job (and that usually meant the railroad or coal mines, or a clerk in a store) or go back to school.
    There was also another option.

    I got to be good friends with the pressroom foreman An apprenticeship was opening up and he wanted me to take it.
    But then I started making plans to go back and finish school the second half of the year. And with summer school, I would get my diploma.
    There was another way and I think that must have been in the back of my mind.
    Because one day I suddenly decided I would join the Army.
    I talked it over with Burl Roland, in Ada and he said he'd go with me.
    I got home that night (a night off from the paper) and I told Mama and Dad what I had decided.
    They were both upset.
    And Dad said he would never sign any papers  for me.
    But I had turned 18 and didn't need his signature.
    He swore that  he'd go to the recruiter and tell them I lied about my age. That I was only 17.
    But they both knew I had made up my mind.
    So I left early to find Burl.
    He had changed his mind.
    So I went on to Bluefield myself.
    In the Army recruiting office, I was told the Army quota for  the month was filled, but there were still two openings for the Air Force.
    I took the tests.
    I passed and was sworn in on the spot.
    I was told to go home, get a minimal amount of personal  stuff, and report to the train station about 9 p.m. that night!
    That was on a Thursday, Jan. 6, 1949.
    I got home, got a few things together and prepared to leave.
    Dad and Mama didn't say much...I think it all happened so fast, all three of us were in shock.
    I had called the paper and told them I was quitting my job.

    And so that night, I began a three-day train ride that would end in San Antonio, Texas and Lackland Air Force Base...and basic training.

EARLY MILITARY BEFORCE THE AIR FORCE

    The Marines hit town with a bang and signed up me and over half of my 10th grade.
They had big plans.
    An armory for the reserve unit.
    Two weeks training at a real military base.
    The chief of police, a retired master sergeant was going to  be the honcho.
    But the plans fell through and most of us forgot the Marines.
    I joined the Army National Guard unit.
    Got a uniform.
    Boy, was I proud, walking around in that on my way to  and from guard drills.
    You have to remember, World War II had only been over three years, so the military and what had been done was still fresh in everybody's minds.
    When I later joined the regular Air Force, I told the recruiters that I was in the Guard and also  thought I might still be in the Marine reserves.
    They said they'd take care of  it.
    Little did I know.

THE HAZARDS OF A GROCER:

    For most of their lives, Dad, Ed and Lewis and Willie Mae operated grocery stores, gasoline stations, and restaurants.
    Dad went in the red many times because he couldn't turn down a hungry person, or somebody out of smokes.
    And there were plenty of those out there, particularly when the miner went on strike.
Ed was always trading.
    If he could have a quarter on something, he’d trade...anything from a pistol to a knife or even a set of dishes.
    He had the opportunity to do so when he ran the commissary a wreck train for the North fork and Western railway.
    Actually the Virginia Supply Company operated the commissary along the rail line. Railroad men could get books of script at the commissaries that would go on the books and be turned into the railroad.
    The railroad would deduct the amount from their pay.
    And needless to say, there was a good markup on items at the commissary.
    Before Lewis and Willie Mae went to work on the commissary company, they ran the little neighborhood grocery on Roanoke Avenue in Bluefield.
    One day, it must have been during the summer when there was no school and I was home in Ada, Ed came by in his car and took Dad and I to Bluefield to do some shopping.
    Of course, we stopped at Lewis' store to see him and Willie Mae and  niece  Jackie.
    Ed pulled up in front of the store and we went in.
    Lewis was sitting down behind the counter, trying to light a cigarette.
    His face was drained of color and his hands were shaking so badly, he couldn't find the end of the cigarette with the match.
    "What's wrong, Lewis," Ed asked.
    Lewis finally got the cigarette going.
    He looked at us and said:
`    "I've just been robbed!"
    A man had come in, asked for something off  the shelf and when Lewis turned around, the man was pointing a gun at him.
    The man took Lewis' wallet and emptied the cash drawer, one of those old cash registers you open with the lever on the side.
    He told Lewis to stay put while he escaped.
    The robber hadn't been gone more than two or three minutes when we walked in.
    Ed picked up the phone and called police.
    The robber was caught a month or so later.
    Of course he had spent the money and the money from another robbery or two.
And he had thrown away Lewis' wallet.
    But police knew they had the right man when they found Willie Mae and Jackie's pictures in the robber's wallet.
    That was the only robbery I can recall, but back when members of the family operated a store in Tazewell (I think Dad ran it, but it could have been Lewis and Willie Mae) a couple of scam artists hit town.
    Punchboards--a cardboard square maybe 10 inches by 12 inches, were popular.
They were illegal, but popular.
    The boards contained rolled up pieces of paper that for a nickel or a dime or a quarter, a player punched out.
    And he could win $10 and as high as $50---depending on the size of the board and how many chances there were.  Supposedly, the merchant who bought the board for five or 10 dollars from the salesman would make enough off the chances to pay for the buying the board and paying the winners, plus a nice profit for himself.
    Enter the scam team.
    One guy would come in with the board--he was the salesman-pump up the storeowner on how he'd be able to turn a quick buck if he bought the board.
    A couple of hours after he left, his partner (or partners) would show up.
    He'd buy a nickel bottle of pop and maybe a pack of cigarettes.
    Then he "spots" the punchboard.
    He usually had a line about how he never had any luck with gambling.
    But maybe he'd take a chance or  two.
    And before the merchant knew it, the player had punched out the top winning prizes, collected and driven off.
    He knew just where the winners were located.

THE HIGH SCHOOL YEARS

    I began  my high school education with a determination that I would go to college and Billy and I would become law partners.
    I signed up for the required courses, including Latin.
    And I knew what they meant by:
    "Latin is a dead language,
    As dead as dead can be,
    It killed off all the Romans
    and now it's killing me."
    The Latin teacher was a Miss Jennings, a little frail looking, gray-haired woman who ran the class with an iron hand.
    But she was fair and if you tried hard, she knew it.
    I got by taking my textbook, finding the words I needed and writing a play in Latin.
    Extra credit.
    And a passing grade.
    During that 10th year, the local garden club was sending a representative to a conservation camp at Jackson Mills, W.Va.  High school students from all over the state would be there to learn about conserving natural resources.
    I was chosen from Beaver.
    This was my first real trip away from home, at least without a relative with me.
    {While working for the Bluefield paper as a reporter, a new girl was hired as another reporter. Turned out this young lady, Janice Sue Riley, was one of the girls I met at the conservation camp while in high school.)
    That same year, another conservation trip, and again I got the nod.
    Only this time, I found out when I got there that I was the only high school student--everybody else were college students and teachers who were getting college credit for the course.
    But everybody was kind.
    And it was fun learning about the trees and such.
    And that's when I had fleeting thoughts of becoming a naturalist or something associated with the outdoors.
    Except I really hated camping, and bugs and roughing it.
    About the only extra curricular activity I took part in  high school was acting.
    I landed a part in the junior class play .
    The big reason, of course, why I couldn't take part in  activities, was getting to and from home since we lived in Ada and I had to ride the school bus.
    But for the play, I stayed nights at Willie Mae's or the Burtons whenever I had to stay over in town.
    The play was about a school principal who was about to lose her job.
    I played the old janitor who jumped through the window to brandish a broom and save her from the bad guys (I think.)

    A lot of  the guys from the 10th grade on had some sort of wheels.
    And in order to get around, they needed gas.
    So if you had 25 cents in your pocket, you were in.
    That would come close to buying a gallon of gas.
    One of these guys was Arthur Jean Riley, a kid who lived with his divorced mother in South Bluefield (that's were the upper class hung their hats.)
    I would save the nickels and dimes the folks gave me for drinks at lunchtime, and that  way I'd have gas money.
    Turned out Arthur and I became fairly close friends.
    I put him in my detective stories.
    The summer after my 10th grade year, I would give him a wake-up call each morning because he was one of those people who needed something extra to get him up and moving.
    At that time I was working in Uncle Olls restaurant in West Graham.
`    {On one of my visits years later, I asked about Arthur. Somebody told me he had been married four times and they weren't sure where he was living or what he was doing.}
     The restaurant was a one-man operation--except at noon when one of his daughters or Aunt Stella would show up from their house nearby to cook while I took the orders.
    I made $5 a week and room and board.
    And if I ate a candy bar, or had a bottle of pop, that was supposed to come out of my $5.
    And then Uncle Will stopped by one day and invited me to spend a week  in Tazewell.
    He added that he was going to reroof his garage and if I helped, he'd give me $20.
    I jumped at the chance.
    And why not?
    I was putting in 10 hours a day for Uncle Oll, seven days a week.
    So I quit.
      

MY FINAL YEAR OF HIGH SCHOOL

    I hit that restless age.
    I wanted to work, I wanted to make my own money.
    The same only grind, walk to the school bus stop, ride the school bus for an hour, go to school, lunch, school, take the bus home, walk home.
    I had no more than a dollar in my pocket at any one time, because the folks didn't have money to waste.
    Of course by this time, Dad was  over 70.
    But this meant nothing to me at the time.
    They would go on forever.
    That's how you look at life when you're in your teens.
    And then one day....
    But I wanted to make my own money,  I wanted to have a dollar or two in my pocket.
    I had a paper route in Ada---the Sunday Telegraph.
    That meant that I either walked or rode my bicycle to the power station on the new Bluefield-Princeton Road on Sunday mornings, where the papers were dropped off.
    I had 20 to 30 customers.
    And I think I made about a nickel on each paper.
    And those customers were scattered all along the Ada road, both sides, up one hollow and down another.
    It would take me  most of the morning to deliver them.
    And of course I tried selling a mail-order salve.
    Mama and Dad wound up buying most of the initial shipment.
    I even tried trapping muskrats along the creek.
    No luck.
    So, when I was in the 10th grade, I heard of an opening in the mailroom of the newspaper.
    You started at midnight and worked until 3 a.m. The pay was 50 cents an hour, but you got  paid for 5 hours. And it was for 6 days a week, a sometimes seven.
    I had a problem with the job, though.
    I needed a social security card and I was only 15.
    That didn't stop me.
    I applied for the card, saying I was 16...the legal work age.
    And I got both the card and the job.
    This was near the end of the school year, so sister Willie Mae put a cot on the screened in back porch of her house for me.
    I would come  in about 3:30 a.m. ( I had to walk about a mile through downtown Bluefield and to the North Side).
    Then at 7 I would get up and get ready for school.
    When school was out for the year, I would go home after each shift at the paper.
    The route driver who took the papers to Princeton would let me out at the intersection of the Ada road and  I'd walk home.
    I'd get some sleep, and then the next day, walk the three miles to the bus stop on the old Princeton Road to go to work.

THE MAILROOM JOB:

    I started out "flying the press" which meant I stood by the conveyor belt that brought the papers up from the pressroom.
    I would scoop up an armful before they could fall off the end of the belt onto the floor.
    These I would deposit on the two metal tables that ran the length of the room.
    These tables were where the rest of  the guys worked, counting and stacking the papers in bundles for the trucks to pick up and take on their routes.
    There were maybe six guys working there--high school students and a college student or two from the 2 year college at the edge of town.
    And they loved to play practical jokes.
    The big joke would involve those metal tables which also had a metal shelve underneath that ran the length of the room.
    If one of the workers came in early and decided to take a snooze, he would lay down on one of the tables.
    And invariably, somebody would come along, pile up some scraps of paper on the shelf underneath.
    Talk about a hotfoot!!!
    Or they would take the paste bucket (a real sticky type) and brush it across a hand while the person slept.
    And that summer, when melons began to appear on the market, one of the guys would get in his car, drive down the state line where there was a produce market--with produce outside and unguarded.
    He'd return with  a dozen canelopes and watermelons.
    {By the way, 10 years or so before this, Dad was part owner of this very same market)
    So what do you do with the melons you can't eat that night?
    You take them into  the pressroom and share with the pressmen and then those leftover go into an old furnace in the pressroom for the next night.
    Saturday nights you could make extra money in the mailing room.
    That's when extra help came in to insert the Sunday comics into the paper.
    It paid $2.50 per thousand.
    Inerrably, they would be short of help, so after the press run was done, I could insert a couple of thousand papers and make an extra $5.
    Mr. Melchior was the mailroom foreman.
    A little old white-haired man, I, at that time, imagined he  was born old.
    He was very fair with everyone and always had a kind word.
    And he recognized hard work and rewarded it.
    I was promoted from flyboy to mailing machine.
    The machine, of  course then, was run by hand.
    The machine was a hand-held rectangle contraption with the glue in the rear and a spoon near the front.
    You loaded a preprinted roll of paper containing addresses and then with your thumb resting against a roller that fed the paper through an opening in the bottom, you began affixing labels to the newspapers.
    The bottom of the labels hit the glue  and then the opening.
    You then pushed down and the label was trimmed off and glued to the paper.
    You had to watch that you didn't push down too soon and cut a label in half.
    Slow at first, but after awhile, it was second nature.
    The truck driver who gave me a ride home each night was one of Mr. Melchior's sons. (He had two who were deliverymen for the paper).
    So when the son was unable for  some reason to make the run, Melclhior would make it, taking me along to Princeton where I would unload the bundles for him.
Then he would drop me off closer to home.
    And one of these trips proved to be a close call.
    It can get foggy around Princeton.
    Real pea soup.
    And on this morning, about 4 a.m. we were coming down the hill leading into Princeton into some of the thickest all season.
    Melchior and I both saw what looked like headlines ahead, so he steered toward and to the right of them.
    Next think we knew, we were off at a 45-degree angle and that old dump truck was listing badly to the right side. Melchior gave it the gas and suddenly we were climbing a small incline and bounced onto pavement...a side road that ran at an angle and would intersect the road we had been on.
    Seems right at the bottom of the hill, on the intersecting road, was the Pepsi Cola plant. And the main entrance had two bright lights, which viewed in the fog, appeared to be headlights.
    That was what we had steered toward.
    A bit shaken up, we continued into Princeton and delivered our papers.


    One of the boys I met in junior high was named Poe.
    He lived with his mother on Mercer Street, which ran up the hill (straight up when you got to the top) and I was allowed to visit him occasionally.
    His mother was divorced and it must have been a very sticky situation.
    Because she would pay me a dollar each week to walk with her son to and from school (about three-fourths of a mile from his house, about a mile from mine, which at that time was on the other side of the Mercer street bridge which spanned the railroad yards and separated downtown Bluefield from the North Side.
    And if anybody tried to approach us--particularly strange men, we were to run like crazy for the nearest policeman--or house.

Tank Hill
    It was about this time, we moved again.
    This time to what is known as Tank Hill because two big water towers were at the summit.
    To get to the top of Tank Hill, you had to go up Mercer Street (as I said, almost straight up.) Before you got to the top, the paved street ended and a dirt road began.
    At the summit, the top of the mountain from flat and the dirt road continued, as least past our house.  It dead-ended a short distance away.
    This was actually a three-story house because the house was built into the side of the hill. You might say it was a forerunner of those later-day earth homes.
    The first floor was built into the side of the hill. The second floor was also against the hill with the backside looking out on what was almost a sheer drop to the hollow below. Off in the distance you could see Cherry Street as it appeared though the giant slice the road builders had to make in the mountain.
    The third floor was all above ground with the front door opening onto Tank Hill.
    Now the wind almost continually blew on Tank Hill.
    And sometimes it got a bit wild.
    Especially during some of those summer and fall storms that bring heavy rain, lightning and high winds.
    The top floor of that old house would shake.
    And it would shake some more with the rattling of the windows making you believe the whole house was about to go into the hollow below.
    Now out in front of the house near where the road when by, was a fence post stuck deep in the ground.
    There was a hole in the post and a heavy hemp rope thrust through the hole and then tied in a loop.
    Maybe the folks that had the house before us failed to tell Dad what this post and rope was for.
    But we found out soon enough when one of  those big storms came up.
     Dad, Mom and I would go out in the pouring rain and the lightning , put our arms though the rope loop and hang on while we watched the house sway.
    At least it seemed to sway.
    Somewhere in these years, sister Willie Mae and brother-in-law Lewis moved to Bluefield from the Tazewell County area where they had been operating a store, restaurant and gasoline station.
    They bought a two-story house and a little corner grocery on the North Side, on Roanoke Street.
    The owner at the time was a Mrs. Mabel Albert, my math teacher in junior high.
    And she got to know me better than a teacher should get to know one of her students.
    She was the typical, old lady teacher, fussy and demanding, especially since she knew my kin, she figured she had a special interest in me.
    So when I got things wrong, she would come down on me hard.
    I never got above second-class scout.

More on Scouting
    I never learned to swim and that was one of the merit badges you needed to advance further.
    The assistant scoutmaster of our troop, a high school student, went on to become a minister.
    I took part in one public ceremony while a scout.
    A War Bond rally luncheon at the  West Virginia Hotel needed color guards, so I was selected along with two others.
    We got a meal out of it---fried chicken.
    Now at that time, there was a guy who sang for functions like these. I don't recall if he was a professional, but he had a beautiful voice.
    I think he had had polio as a child, because he walked with the aid of two canes.
He was a handsome man, if fact, I thought he could have been a double for old-time movie star Richard Arlen.
    But I was sitting beside him after the opening ceremonies in which we did our color guarding and he sang the National Anthem.
    I was trying to pick at my chicken with my fork and wasn't making too much progress.
    He watched me with an amused look on his face.
    Then he picked up the piece of  chicken on his plate and said:
    "Hey, if this chicken isn't good enough to pick up in your fingers and eat, it's not good enough to eat!" and he proceeded to tear into the chicken with his teeth.
    I followed suit.
    It was during the war years, that I saw my first real-life celebrity.
    Actress Greer Garson, the redheaded star of Mrs. Miniver showed up for a War Bond Rally in downtown Bluefield.
    The town and surrounding territory turned out enmass.
    She rode in a jeep, accompanied by three of the biggest Marines I ever laid eyes on. They were dressed in their blues, swords at their sides, and their chests covered with ribbons.
    Miss Garson was smiling and waving to the crowd. She took a microphone and made her pitch for War bonds.
    The line to buy at that time went up the street and out of sight.
    Another war-related incident that I was almost involved in.
    I say almost, because it happened while I was in one of  Bluefield's three movie theaters.
    Seems a troop train had pulled into the railroad station.
    One of the GIs had gotten off and he had had a bit too much to drink.
    A policeman approached him, words were exchanged, and all at once the policeman was beating the GI over the head with his club.
    Other policemen at the station rushed over, as GIs starting pouring off the train.
    They formed a circle around their fellow officer and managed to get him out of the station.
    Meanwhile the GI was rushed to the hospital.
    The GIs kept coming off the train.
    Civilians at the station joined them.
     Thus began a march on the police station.
      Being a Saturday evening, the town was full of miners and farmers and railroaders.
    The mob gathered outside the station demanding the policeman who had beaten the GI.
    They were threatening to storm the station and take him by force.
    The state police arrived.
    Tear gas was fired.
    I had just come out of the theater and was looking for Dad and Ed who were to meet me and take me home.
    So I got a whiff of the teargas.
    That gas discouraged the crowd.
    Later, it was revealed the GI had a concussion and spent a couple of  weeks in the hospital.
    The cop who beat him had hidden in the bell tower of a church near the police station.
    It also came out that this cop had been dismissed from the police force in North Carolina for using unnecessary force.

Commissary Clerk—a Bummer for me

    Ed and Wille Mae and Lewis spent a good part of their lives working for the railroad commissary. When the commissary company—the Virginia Supply Co.—went out of business, they sold their stores to the managers.
    Ed and Ruth took over the commissary in a Cincinnati suburb. They retired from that place. Three months later, Ed died. He had health problems with diabetes and had lost a leg to the disease.
    Willie Mae and Lewis had the railroad store in Iaeger, W.Va. They, too, eventually retired.
    So it would follow that I would try my hand in the business.
    In this case it was during the summer before, I believe, the start of the 11th grade of high school.
    I was hired for the Bluefield store.
    I don’t remember the wage, but it included room and board—the room being behind the store and next to the kitchen.
    The manager was a man by the name of Ashley. His son and I had gone through junior high together and on to high school, but he was not a particularly good friend…a bit too stuck-up as far as I was concerned.
    I lasted at the most, three days at the place.
    First off, you got up about 6 a.m. and the cook sat a place of food before you.
    You finished up and then began waiting on customers as they drifted in—some clean and fresh smelling as they prepared for their workday.
    Others, covered with soot and grease and smelling a bit less than pleasant, just coming off their night’s work in the railroad yards and the roundhouse.
    You cleaned away the dirty dishes and wiped the counter spots where the customers had been.
    As soon as the place was almost empty, a broom and mop was the next order of the day.
    Manager Ashley usually just sat at his desk, drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette and watching myself and another clerk as we tried to keep up with the orders.
    Occasionally he’d lend a hand.
    Then came restocking shelves and the pop coolers.
    There were no breaks.
    If there were no customers, you wiped and rewiped the counters. Or rearranged the shelves.
    And then it was time for lunch.
    And then supper.
    Of course, in between meals, you were waiting on customers buying groceries.
    And about 6 p.m. of so, the day ended.
    I was completely exhausted that night.
    The second day was the same.
    But that evening, the boss’s son asked if I wanted to go downtown with him. Downtown in Bluefield was just across the tracks..About 50 or so railroad tracks.
    We met a couple of other guys that I also knew from school. Whatever we did does not stand out—I think it was mostly playing pinball machines.
    But about halfway through whichever place we were in, I looked around and junior and the two other guys were gone.
    So, I headed back across the tracks to the commissary.
    Of course, the next day, Junior wanted to know where I had gone—he couldn’t find me. So I was the bad guy—I had left them.
    That day, I started the clerk routine again.
    About halfway through—just as lunch hour was beginning, I went over to Boss Ashley sitting at his desk, as usual, took off my apron and little hat, put them on his desk and told him I quit.
    His response:
    “Your brother would never do something like this.”
    I told him:” You wouldn’t treat my brother the way you’re treating me. He’d probably punch you out!”
    (Ed had worked for Ashley for a while. Then he moved onto the wreck trains—the trains had a commissary car for workers so they wouldn’t have to worry about cigarettes and the such, since a lot of the wrecks they cleared away could be in remote areas.)
    Before the work trains, Ed managed the commissary at Matawan, W.Va. And on a visit home during the summer, he took me back with him for a week’s stay.
    Two things I remember about that visit:
    The narrow swinging bridge—the type you see the movie good guys have to cross in a hurry while being chased by the bad guys.
    It swung and swayed with every step—more than a pine tree buffered by a 50-mile-an-hour wind.
    Once across it, I did not venture out on it again until it was time to go home.
    This commissary was like many such stores, offering food, groceries and rooms.
    Ed had help—a cook and a clerk, but when one of those two came down sick—or drunk—he had to fill in.
    Thus the second thing I remember:
    It was the evening and we were in his quarters. He was dead tired.
    He asked me if I’d get him a glass of water.
    I was feeling devilish, so I got the water—and dissolved some soap in it.
    He took a big swallow and, well; let’s just say he did not appreciate the joke.
    I ran into the other room with a feeling of doom.
    I think that was the only time he laid a hand on me.
    A couple of sharp swats to the behind.
    Looking back, I think I deserved it.
   
   
   
RADIO DAZE

    The radio was our main source of entertainment on a daily basis.
    I loved those old comedy shows—Lum and Abner, Jack Benny, Amos and Andy—each night we’d usually listen together. Mama would be sewing something or working on a quilt.
Dad would be sitting by the coal bucket in the living room…that way he had a place to spit his tobacco juice.
    And then there were the action and adventure series—Jack Armstrong, and particularly Captain Midnight.
    Captain Midnight was my favorite. I even got the folks to buy a jar of Ovaltine so I could send in the label so I could join his secret squadron and get a decoder shield.
    It arrived, all shiny, and to me, as precious as the gold coloring. Then each week, the secret message was broadcast—and using the decoder, you lined up the numbers with letters and spelled out the secret message.
   
THAT OLD TERRIPLANE   

    An old Hudson Terriplane coupe figured in our family over the years.
    Seems to me, whenever brother-in-law Lewis was a bit short on cash, he’d sell it to brother Ed—and vise versa.
    It must have been in the family for at least 10 years.
    I can remember riding with sister Willie Mae along the road in Tazewell that ran past the dam. I could barely see over the dash.
So she sat me on her lap and let me steer.
    One of the times Ed acquired the car, he had an accident with it.
    It was at one of our Ada homes. The road ran just above the house. Below the house was the railroad. There was a fence between the yard and the railroad, but not at the top of the hill.
    Ed had driven his current girlfriend, Pearl Lavender, along with Dad, to town. They returned and Pearl and Dad got out and started down the path to the house.
    Ed was parking the car. He had the car door open and was hanging onto it with his left hand.
    Something happened, his foot hit the gas pedal too hard—the car lurched—he turned the wheel to the right and the sudden turn and acceleration threw him out of the car.
    The driverless car plunged over the side of the road and down the hill, just missing Dad, but hitting Pearl.
    The car ended up against the fence at the railroad tracks.
    Pearl wound up in the hospital for a few weeks.
    The car was pulled back onto the road—a fender was straightened  and it was as good as new.
    And while on the subject of cars…
    We owned a few over the years. And when I would express interest in learning to drive, the current car was sold within a week.
    I guess Dad didn’t want me to “fool with them things.”
    I did not learn to drive until I was discharged from the service and was working on the Bluefield Daily Telegraph.
    Dot taught me in on an old stick shift 1936 Chevy.

Smoking

    I started smoking cigarettes when we lived on the North Side of Bluefield. What did they cost then? Maybe a quarter a pack.
But for awhile I rarely had to pay anything, since Don Williams, the neighbor boy, and I started buying cigarettes with the script money left over after a trip to the railroad commissary.
    I didn’t tell the folks.
    I only smoked when I was away from home.
    Then one day Mama asked me if I was smoking.
    I figured Ed—who was working at a small plant at that time—had told on me. I was smoking when I passed the plant, and Ed was sitting outside taking his break—an, of course, smoking.
    I told her yes and asked if Ed had told on me.
    She said no, she found a pack in my pocket when she started to wash a pair of pants.
    She just said she wished I hadn’t acquired the habit and that was that.
    Later, when the free cigarette source dried up, she gave me money to buy them.
    (I smoked until I was in my 30s. In fact, in the 60s when the surgeon general’s report on the dangers of smoking came out, myself and copyeditor Carol Camp were sitting at the copydesk at the Beacon Journal editing the report—both puffing away—me at a cigarette and he with his pipe.
    (Publisher Ben Maidenburg came by, stopped an laughed:
“Now that’s quite a sight—here you two are editing a report that says smoking can kill you—and you’re puffing away on your own coffin nails.”
    (“I didn’t quit then, and I don’t remember just when. I do remember I went back to the cigarette machine and saw the price had gone to 75 cents a pack. I put my money back in my pocked and told myself I didn’t need them anymore.
    (“And I was smoking four packs a day.
    (Later I did go to cigars, but finally quit all smoking.)

TRAINS & RAILROAD TRACKS

    Sometimes I think I might have become a railroad man what with living beside the tracks a lot of my life and with the rails such a part of my early life.
    If I could get out of school 10 minutes early, I could run down to the Bluefield train station, buy a ticket for a dime and board the passenger train heading for Roanoke.
    And get off at the regular stop in Ada.
    This meant I didn’t have the school bus ride. And that was something in itself.
    The bus would pick us up at Ramsey (and later Beaver)—take us to South Bluefield and the junior high school there. We would be let off and have to wait there while the bus went to the third junior high and picked up students. These students were from the Bramwell Road area.
    After depositing them on Bramwell Road, the bus would come back and pick us up and take us home. That put us back in Ada about 5:30 or 6 o’clock.
    And I had another two miles to walk to our place.
    So I tried to make the train whenever I could. For the fare, I saved it was the quarter I was usually given each day to buy drinks to go with the lunch Mama had packed.
    The lunch was usually homemade apple butter or jelly on biscuits. And maybe an apple.
    But I’ve gotten a bit off “track”—if you’ll pardon the pun.
    I always got one of those hair-stands up on the back of your neck chills when the smoke-belching rail monsters came by. And the passenger trains those days with faces peering out the windows as they sped by.
    You’d wave and most would wave back.
    The rails were a source of fuel for our stoves.
    We never paid for coal.
    Dad and I or Mama would take a couple of coal buckets and start walking the tracks—especially this one sharp curve. And in a few minutes the buckets would be full of coat that had fallen off the coal cars.
    (A few years earlier, when we lived at the place in West Graham where Mama fed all the hobos, we had even better luck with coal along the railroad. Big, big lumps there, because these same hobos would get on the coal cars and roll off the big lumps—payback for all the meals their fellow travelers had eating at our house.)
    I tried  “riding the rails” just once.
    I must have been a teenager and a couple guys and I were on our way to Bluefield and decided to try hitching a ride on a train.
The trains always started slowing down in Ada for the upcoming Bluefield yards.
    Running along beside the train, we grabbed hold of the ladders on a box card and swung up.
    I had that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I did not like this mode of transportation…. I preferred being inside a coach sitting down. I expected to fall off any minute or, worse, a railroader would come along with that big wooden stick they used to slip into the wheel that control brakes.
    Neither happened, and as we entered the Bluefield yards, we dropped off and scattered.
   
    We never took a vacation. A Sunday trip maybe to visit relatives, but that was about it.
    Brother Ed used to drive us to Wytheville, Va. for a visit to some of Mama’s relatives. A wild trip in those days since it was two lanes up the mountains and down.
    But we would get visitors. Ed and his wife Daisy and Willie Mae and Lewis from Cincinnati (had to be late 30s).
    And Mama’s sister, Lula Criger and her daughter Margaret.
    You know what sticks in the memory on those visits?
    Margaret and her demands on her mother.
    Of course her mother seem to dote on her.
    But one of the things Margaret demanded at breakfast:
    Fried eggs—but with the yoke dipped out after frying.
    No, just frying the whites wouldn’t do. She wanted the whole eggs and then Aunt Lula had to carefully dip out the yoke.
    Later, after Margaret married, one of her daughters, Pat, remembers visiting us as a child. Pat and I email a bit—she and her husband live in Mississippi.
    Two other visitors—these when we lived on the North Side in Bluefield—were two cousins—brothers—of Mama. They were on their way to somewhere from somewhere. They always carried a couple or three guitars and such. And they’d play a tune or two for us.
    They would spend a night or two and then leave.
    On one such visit, they gave me a mandolin.
    That was like giving an anvil to a drowning man.
    I was not musically inclined.
    And never could learn a note on anything.
    Even the piano.
    A couple of times we moved to houses where the folks before us had the old player pianos. They were usually too heavy and difficult to move,
    I could load one of the paper rolls and turn the machine on and let it play a tune, but I personally couldn’t get a good note out of it.
    And when I went out for band, I wound up at the “gofer” guy.
    I really don’t know how many brothers and sister Mama had.
And I don’t know the first name of her father and mother.
    I do recall one of those detective-police pulp magazines that flourished in the late 30s and 40s that had a cover story and photos on the double murder of a couple in Missouri.
    A man and woman. The man was Mama’s youngest brother.
    Grandfather Patrick moved from Virginia to Missouri. How many times he was married is unclear, but I think it was at least three.
    As a boy, I had an address of a cousin in Galena, Mo. And we became pen pals. But as we both grew older, the letters ceased and we went our separate ways.
    On the other side of the family—Dad’s…nobody seems to know the first name of his father and mother. Birth certificates were either not issued—(home births)—or were lost.
    The practice was to write such information in the family Bible. But if one existed, no one knows it whereabouts.
   
    When it came to doctoring, we rarely saw a doctor.
    Mama was THE doctor.
    To this day, I can barely stand grape juice. I just don’t put myself in a position to drink any. Grapes are fine. But no grape juice.
    The reason?
    When Mama decided I needed a laxative, she put Epson Salts or Castor Oil in a glass of our homemade grape juice and made me drink it.
    And that flavor seems to linger in any grape juice I drink today.
    Some of Mama’s other remedies:
    Bad cold or fever?
    Some of the toddy and then fry up some onions for an onion poultice. Spread those onions on the chest, top the onions with a piece of flannel cloth and tie tightly.
    Cut yourself?
    Or maybe you have a boil starting to fester.
    Dad would put a new chaw of his Brown’s Mule in his mouth.
    He’d chew until it was good and moist.
    Then the brown, wet mess was spread on the cut or the boil and bandaged.
    And the “homemade” remedies seem to do their job.
    Our visits to a doctor were few. And never a hospital.
    But, while we lived at one of the many houses in Ada, Dad became very ill. And he had spent two or three days in bed, only getting out to use the chamber pot under the bed.
    I think it was Ed who came by and saw Dad’s condition.
He found a telephone and called a doctor—I think he had gone to him a few times.
    And the doctor made a house call to take care of Dad.
    He came from Bluefield and risked his car on the old dirt road that ran near out house.
    And there was no running to a drug store for medicine.
The doctor had medicine in that old familiar black bag.
    A dentist?
    We never went to one.
    Of course our teeth showed it.
    I think Mama had lost most of hers as had Dad.
    Mine?
    While in basic training in the Air Force, the dentist decided one of my teeth had to go.
    He was a major. I was a private.
    So the tooth would go.
    He shot in the Novocain, but it really did little to deaden the pain. And he was having problems getting the tooth to leave my mouth. And I was agitated to no end.
    So he had his nurse hold my arms while he parked his knee in the middle of my chest and yanked.
    I staggered out of the clinic and back to my barracks..still bleeding. I made it to my bunk and passed out.
    The next thing I knew, the drill sergeant was holding a bag of ice to my jaw.
    And he kept getting ice and refilling the bag until the bleeding finally stopped.
    And that episode really soured me on dentists.
    For the next 30-plus years, the only time I went to a dentist was when a tooth absolutely had to be pulled. And I demanded to be put under.
    The result was hurry up mouth makeover when I retired. I needed a lot of work and I was trying to get it while I still had insurance. Saving money had temporally cured me of my dentist fears.
    Turned out the thought was more painful than the work.
I met some nice people and had little or no pain as one dentist pulled 5 teeth, another did some surgery on my gums and the third made partials and has become my regular dentist. I see him every three months for a checkup and cleaning.

ON TO THE AIR FORCE

    After three days of riding trains, changing in Chicago and Kansas City (and even though we had tickets for sleeping compartments, we didn't get one until after Kansas City.
    We ate on the train, in the dining car, all on Uncle Sam.
    It was The Great Adventure for me, a young fellow who had not been more than 100 miles from home in 18 years.
    This was January and there had been snow and then a thaw and then a heavy rain.
The fields that lay on either side of the rails were covered in water...a devastating flood.
    We changed trains (I use we, because along the way, other recruits for the Air Force got on the train, so that by the time we boarded in Kansas City, there were a number of us. And I was with a fellow from the Bluefield area, who was the second of the two-man quota the recruiters had for January of 1949.
    In Chicago, we went from one train right to another.
    But in Kansas City there was a long (6 or 7 hour) layover.
    And I saw my first burlesque show.
    Tame, tame compared to what goes on today.
   
    We arrived in San Antonio and a bus took us to Lackland.
    It was about 9 or 10 p.m. on a Saturday night when we arrived.
    And the processing began.
    We signed for our "flying 10"--$10 dollars most of which went for a haircut and necessities.
    Our clothes went into boxes with our names and addresses, to be mailed back to our next of kin.
    We were issued uniforms and fatigues...the fatigues we put on immediately as our civilian clothes were taken away.
    And then we straddled a series of benches--you scooted forward as the man ahead of you did the same.
    At the end of the benches was a barber--with a pair of clippers.
    Zip, Zip, Zip and you were almost as bald as a baby's bottom.
    And then to the lines were a couple of medics stood with waiting needles.
    And I hated shots.
    I almost turned and went AWOL on the spot.
    I had a fear of those needles.
    And it wasn't until the 7th grade that I finally got the shots required for school in those days, and only after I was threatened with expulsion.
    (Of course I had had most of the diseases of the day by then, so I didn't really have to worry about getting the measles, mumps or chicken pox.)
    A quick poke in either arm and you had the first of a dozen or so shots you would get for the next 13 weeks.
    But then, lo and behold, as they say, we were walked (marched would not be a good description here) to the mess hall for a snake before bed.
    By this time it was midnight and I could just see a couple hours sleep and then the ordeal of boot camp would begin.
    In the barracks, the flight chief, a staff sergeant introduced himself and his assistant, a corporal of Mexican descent.
    The flight chief himself, was a tall, man who spoke softly, but you had the first impression, that from here on out, you were all his.
    He turned out to be hard, but fair and you sensed that he took his job seriously and he expected you to do the same. He was here to train you and he expected you to train.
    Later on, when Hugh O'Brien burst on the TV scene as Wyatt Earp, I thought I was looking at that flight chief. O'Brien was a double for him.
   
    How many men were in the barracks.
    Men from every state in the union and even one from Guatemala.
    I think about 40.
    We picked a bunk and that was to be the place we hoped to get some sleep during the next 13 weeks of trying to become Air Force GIs.
   
    Dead tired, I don't think there was any movement from anybody once we all hit the sack.
    And the Air Force let us sleep until 10 a.m.
    Once a shower and shave, then to the mess hall for breakfast, even though the rest of the squadron had already eaten.
    The food?
    It's been along time, but one thing sticks with me, a dish or a spread that was a mainstay of basic---jelly (any kind) mixed with peanut butter.
    There were big bowls of the stuff on each table.
    And it was good.

    After breakfast, we were allowed to go to the PX close by to buy cigarettes or anything else we needed--from what was left of that flying 10.
    And we were told to reassemble in the Squadron area about 1 p.m.
    Most of us went to the PX and then wandered back into the barracks to get acquainted, particularly to see if anybody was from the same state.
    Our oldest recruit was 22, a bespectacled, mild looking man from North Carolina.
    Our youngest was a 17 year old from Pennsylvania.
    Our biggest--maybe 300 pounds--was from Louisiana. His feet were so large that they were not able to find shoes for him immediately, so for most of the 13 weeks of training, he wore his civilian shoes.
    Of course there were others from other states, but these three stand out after all these years.
    And of course, the fellow from Guatemala.
    For the first time in a long time, it snowed at Lackland, and this  kid, who had ever seen snow, was outside in a flash rolling and playing in it.
    `
    But back to  that second full day in basic training.
    When we assembled in what can only be described as a civilian military formation, we were loaded into trucks and driven to the amphitheater at the other end of the base.
    And there, sitting on the raised hill, looking down on the stage, we had an introduction to the service that's gotta be hard to top.
    For the band in the band shell was Les Brown.
    The singer was Doris Day.
    And here comes a fire engine with comedian Bob Hope and Jerry Colona aboard.
    A great start for the 13 weeks ahead of getting up at 5 a.m.--drilling, cleaning, learning.