There Be Dragons

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As a very young child, I read a book called Lost Horizon that captured my attention and introduced me to India, China and Tibet. Reading that book lead me to another book written about a Medical Doctor serving in Indonesia. He was fighting some kind of fever and the only cure was something called PG. Late in the book it became apparent that PG was simply "pure gin." I read more and more books about that area of the world: some Kipling (The Jungle Book, "Riki-Tiki-Tavi", Kim; Lowell Thomas (With Lawrence in Arabia, Book of the High Mountain); and many more. Some World War II books about the area were on my list also. I heard about Sumatra, Tibet, New Delhi, Bangkok and on and on.

I've never been to any of those places though I have lived in a number of places in the northern half of the Western Hemisphere. I think though that a lot of my sense of adventure or "adventure quotient" came from those readings. I once read that people like me love to look at old maps and in particular those maps which have the caption "There be Dragons" on the very edge of the world. I've done some interesting jobs too and will talk about them later when I get this period of my youth completed.

Few have placed their hand on the key used to release megatons of nuclear weapons. Fewer still have programmed the delivery vehicles for them. And I'm willing to be serious money that I am the only one who having done this was also a foot soldier in Iraq! Life with the dragons has helped me feel significant and shown me the world, but now, with those days complete I still seek the lost horizon...

Magnolia Playground

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Before moving too much into the future of my past I'd like to talk about the playground at Magnolia Elementary School. I remember it as being all covered with white sand, large oaks all around and fairly large. There was a "jungle gym" made all of 1/2 inch galvanized pipe where we climbed and hung by our legs, a set of swings that were quite tall and used heavy duty chains for support, see-saws and a sliding board. That sliding board was the main attraction. I would say that it was at least ten feet high and made of some really slick metal which took a polishing every day by little behinds. That slide was terrific! The first time I went down it - at the "suggestion" of my "friends" was breath taking. I literally knocked my breath out when I landed. I couldn't talk or move or breathe for what seemed forever. Then my breath started coming back and I got better. It was weeks at least before I tried it again.

In the middle of the yard, we could play football though I was seldom involved because I didn't have a clue how to play. I do have a clear memory of when Walt Latham broke his leg at recess. There was a huge pileup and an audible "snap". That was the first time I'd heard a human bone break.

One part of the playground was in a corner next to the school where we could go if we didn't want the teachers to see what we were up to. That's where I had my first kiss. WOW! I was impressed and of course embarrased and all jittery. It was a long time before something like that happened again. As I think about it now, there should be a stone marker there with a brass plate on it with the date and time.

The farm was my other playground and that's one that will take a posting of its own. Imagine a playground of almost 500 acres of fields and woods and added to that another couple of thousand acres that belonged to neighbors.

De La Howe's Tomb

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In the early 1800's Jean De La Howe a Huguenot Minister and physician left money and acreage in his will for the purpose of building and supporting a school for children who lost their parents. The pupils attended in residence and were taught how to do everything that they would need to know to live in the backwoods - blacksmithing, farming, veterinary medicine, cooking, spinning, weaving, sewing, etc. Dr. De La Howe left instructions that he be buried inside an open roofed building made of brick and with a steel door. He also left 3,000 acres of virgin pine forest with instructions that at least one thousand acres always be planted in pines.

The pine trees that I remember seeing as a youngster towered well over 100 feet in the air and there were thousands and thousands of them. I guess they have been cut now, but they really were something to see in those days. I remember the family visiting the tomb and Mamma telling everyone that De La Howe's Wife and Mistress were both buried in the enclosure. The story now is that he and "several members of his family" are buried there.

The virgin pine forest was a great place for bootleggers in the 1920's and 30's and probably hides many patches of hemp weed today. Daddy said that the bootleggers would have spotters in the tops of the tall trees all the way around the site. The spotters would signal the people at the still with a mirror if they saw revenuers coming. He also said that if they walked the trail to the still in the morning, they would check for cobwebs stretched across. If there were no cobwebs, they wouldn't go to the still because someone else had gone down the trail since the day before.

He told a tale that a certain Mr. Mariney owned a farm near the Savanna river. One day a revenuer came to his house and asked if he could look around the farm for stills. Mr. Mariney reportedly said, Mr. Fed, you can walk down that creek to the river, you can walk back into that big holler over there and you can go most anywhere you want except that little holler over there. There's probably a big bear in that holler!

Daddy's Sawmill Job

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Daddy started out his career as a fifteen year-old working with a gang of sawmill hands. They camped in the woods and every day would go out and cut trees with manual two man crosscut saws, haul them back with mules and then saw them up for lumber with a steam powered sawmill. Each day they ate a hearty breakfast and a huge dinner but had no lunch. Members of the gang took turns cooking unless there was someone hurt and then the invalid would stay in camp and cook until he was ready to go back out on the job. The job paid a dollar a day for everyone that worked. There were no weekends or holidays - you just worked until all the trees were cut and sawed into lumber. Then you helped haul the lumber to town. He said that each day he would start out by drinking half a quart jar of moonshine and giving the rest to one of his buddies. Daddy had connections and each week would leave money in a tree stump which would be replaced by a number of quarts of white liquor. One of Daddy's favorite stories was that he had his foot "mashed" by a tree and had to stay in camp and cook. He was asked if he knew how to cook and he said yes. As soon as everyone headed out for work, he cleaned up the site and washed dishes in the creek beside their camp. Then he poured about 20 pounds of navy beans in the cook pot, covered them in water and sat back to take it easy all day. Within an hour, the beans were out of water and he got more from the creek. He kept adding water until the beans started overflowing the pot and then he started taking beans from the pot and hiding them. When supper finally came, he served the scorched, crunchy mess to the crew. They didn't string him up, but they did find someone else to cook!

Uncle Frank and Aunt Pauline

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Aunt Pauline and Uncle Frank were probably my favorite relatives. They didn't have kids of their own, and they were always trying to spoil me. Uncle Frank pronounced apple as "Opple" and would always bring me one whenever I was around. Frank's mother - Mrs. White - lived with and took care of Big Mamma (Eugene McKinney. who was my dad's mom.) Mrs. White always kept her hair done up on top of her head and I was really surprised once to see her hair when it wasn't tied up. It actually reached her ankles.

Uncle Frank ran liquor stores and played poker. He was pretty good at it and I assume accumulated a lot of money. He also, from time to time, sold bonded liquor from his home on Sundays and after sundown. He was arrested several times, but was never convicted. Uncle Frank also drank a lot of brown liquor. His brand was Jim Beam. He used to say that a lot of doctors told him that if he didn't quit drinking, he would die. He always laughed after telling that and said, "And I outlived every damn one of them." When he was in his eighties, he had problems with blackouts and Aunt Pauline always kept a half-pint bottle of Jim Beam in her purse. When he started having one of his blackout fits, she would feed him a tablespoon of Beam and he would straighten right out.

Aunt Pauline ran a combination pool hall and beer joint near Matthews Millhill. She had four pinball machines too. Her machines would "pay off" even though it was against the law and lots of people would spend their paychecks at those machines. Sometimes she would let well known people in on Sunday and let them play pool, pinball and drink beer. Once, she was raided by the local police. As the story goes, she hit Ramey Underwood (a deputy sheriff) with her fist and broke his jaw. Then she decided to run out the back door of her bar. Unfortunately she forgot that the steps had been torn down and she broke both ankles. I know she didn't go to jail or "do time" for this, so she must have had to pay a fine.

Aunt Pauline and Uncle Frank were good people who made their living in a different way. They didn't "prey on" their customers, but they did take the money that others wanted to give up. Uncle Frank died in the 1990's and Aunt Pauline died while I was in Iraq in 2005. She left me $5,000.00 which I thought was very nice of her.

My Great Great Great Grandfather - Blackbeard the Pirate

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Susie just reminded me that one of my Mom's claims to fame is that she was descended from a pirate - not just any pirate, but Blackbeard the famous pirate. I really can't tell you how she arrived at this conclusion, but I can tell you that Blackbeard did spend a lot of time in Eastern North Carolina where my mother was born. Blackbeard appeared to be friends with the then governor of North Carolina, Charles Eden. Mom was born in a town called Edenton which was named after the governor. Conceivably Mamma could have had a great-great grandmother who was the consort of Edward Teach which was Blackbeard's real name. I don't know...

Mamma, Mac and I visited her hometown after she got sick. It was a good trip, just us three driving from little town to little town talking about the past. We found some people who were named "Everest", which was her mom's maiden name and actually visited one family that said that they remembered Mamma's family. They left North Carolina a long long time ago. Mamma was about five or six years old when they moved and that would have been around 1916. They moved to the swamps of South Carolina where my grandfather held several jobs over the years. He was a trapper, a trestle watcher and a farm hand supervisor.

In 1919, the whole family became ill with the "Spanish Flu" and as a result, Mamma's dad and her little sister died. That's when Mamma and her brothers and sisters had to go to an orphanage in Franklin Springs Georgia. They lived there for several years until their mom remarried. Her new husband was named "Dad Walton" and he welcomed George, Geneva and Mamma into his home. Later, her other siblings, Pearl, Edna, Enza and Bill were born.

My Grandparents

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I visited my Dad's parent's graves today. There was a funeral in Edgewood Cemetary that I was attending and thought I would try to find their plot. I found out that my grandfather's name was William Rufus McKinney (aka Big Papa) and that my grandmother's name was McGrath instead of Tolbert. McGrath, by the way, in this part of the country is pronounced McGraw (as in "queeksdraw mcgraw".) When I saw that I remembered a story that I had heard a long, long time ago. It seems that my grandmother was a Tolbert, but both her parents passed away when she was very young - leaving her as the heiress to a lot of land. As the story goes, her Dad's brother paid the McGrath's to adopt her so that he could take control of the properties. I also recall that the McGraths were not kind to her and that she married at a very early age in order to get away from them. My Dad said that her sister (and I can't remember her name) was married when she was 9 years old. He showed me the tree under which she played with her dolls after the wedding.

Another interesting note is that I also found my wife Pat's grandparent's graves are located adjacent to my grandparents! That's fairly odd, since they didn't know each other and grew up/ lived in different worlds - go figure.

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• Remembering Dad..A Short Pictorial (weirdnursingtales.blogspot.com)

My Dad

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My Father, Henry Napoleon McKinney was born to Rufus and Eugenia Savannah Tolbert McKinney on December 9th 1907. He was the only boy in a family of five kids. His sisters were: Bennie, Amanda, Louise and Pauline. They all lived in a place called New Bordeaux South Carolina which had been settled by French Huguenots in the late 1700's. They came to the new world to escape religious persecution.

Daddy's family was close knit and they all worked on the farm they lived on. I remember him telling me that by the time he was 12 years old, he was running a 9 mule farm. His dad had bad arthritis (probably rheumatoid arthritis) and was pretty much incapable of either farming or pursuing his job of village blacksmith. At one time the family moved to Dublin, Georgia to co-op with Daddy's Uncle Perry McKinney. That was when the boll weevil took over the cotton crop and everyone went pretty much busted. They returned to McCormick County to pretty much nothing. Most of the land was sold for back taxes and they retrenched into a fairly small farm with an old farmhouse to get through the bad times. Then their house burned and they had to retrench further. I remember him saying that his grandfather's rifle from the War Between the States was burned up in that fire.

Another story about the fire was about the pump organ they had. Aunt Louise would play the organ for everyone in the community for their entertainment. When the people in the area saw the house burning they ran inside and grabbed the pump organ and took it outside. It was completely destroyed by their rough handling, but that and a few personal items were all that were saved. My dad knew that his mother really liked her pitcher and bowl that she kept in the bedroom. He was also of the habit of keeping his prized pocket knife under the same bowl. After the fire had completely consumed the house the family was sitting around exhausted and my grandmother said that she wished that she had saved her pitcher and bowl. Daddy went around one of the outlying houses and brought the bowl and pitcher to her saying that he had saved it. He said at that point that he wished he had saved his pocketknife at the same time. When he said that, she pulled his knife out of her apron pocket. She had reached under the bowl to save it.
I remembered Daddy today because its Fathers Day but now forty years after his death I still think of him often.

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If by now you haven't detected that at age 9 or 10 I was a self-centered, egotistical, little so-and-so, let me fill in the blanks for you. A kid that refuses to do homework and gets away with it is an incorrigible brat. The first thing I learned in seventh grade was that the Sunday afternoon picnic was over. Fight it, run from it, hide? Nope, none of those worked. After 9 weeks I was pretty much failing everything. I - the one that had always been the teacher's pet - was out of my element and perhaps in so deep I would never recover. I hated Northside and darn near everyone in it - teachers, classmates, eigth and ninth graders, bus drivers - all of them. I especially hated the principal, Mr. R.O. Marbert. I was a great con artist and he wasn't having any.

I began to study a little. I also did some homework. Not a lot of homework, but enough to pass a test or two. I always made A's in science classes and history, but let's say math wasn't my cup of tea. Really, who cares which train gets to Chicago first? Like I said I made some pretty good grades, but we won't go into math grades because my children and their children may read this someday.

Along about the beginning of the second semester at Northside things began to get more bearable. I was able to play my trumpet in band class pretty good and the little work I was doing got me out of the doghouse about grades. I never liked the place, but I faked it enough to get by.
One thing that I did discover that was a huge delight was Science Fiction. One day while looking around in the Library I happened to pick up a book written by Robert Anson Heinlein. As I recall the title was "Double Star" and I was soon hooked. I read all the Sci-Fi in the school library and started getting books from the public library. In class, I would open my textbook to the correct page for the lecture and then put my pulp magazine or science fiction novel inside it. As I appeared to be poring over the interesting stuff in the book I went un-noticed for the most part. It was a good trick that I used for years to keep from learning any of that ugly stuff they tried to teach us.

The Rest of Elementary School

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Elementary School years were pretty good. The curriculum wasn't all that tough and we were all friends - though we fought sometimes and argued a lot too. Fourth, fifth and sixth grade years are pretty much of a blur. We figured out that life was going to be: get up, get dressed, go somewhere you don't want to go, come home, do chores, go to bed.

Mrs. Gussie Sligh ran the fourth grade with an iron fist. She really tried to get us interested and she really tried to get me to do homework. When Mr Stewart was introduced into the equation I relented for a while, half did homework for a while longer, copied other people's homework on the bus sometimes and sometimes just didn't worry about it at all. I think she gave up on me towards the end and I still passed on to the next grade. The thing that I remember most about her class is both visual and olfactory imagery. We did a science experiment that involved Red Cabbage and Ink. I will never forget the smell and I added red cabbage to my list of things that I will not eat.

I''m sitting here trying to think of my fifth grade teacher's name. She had red hair and was rather old. I suspect she was in her fifties. Anyway she and I had a rough time of it. She decided that I was going to do homework and I dug in my heels. The system finally brought in my parents and homework became a supervised afternoon chore for a while. I would come home, do my other chores and then sit at the kitchen table with my books doing homework. I didn't have a clue how I was going to escape this one and finally found that I could "fake" homework to Mamma's satisfaction.

Sixth grade was Mrs. Ruth Sproles Carroll. A portly matron with cotton white hair. I don't remember much about sixth grade except that we were very "social" that year. My best friend was Gail Griffith who went to school at Northside. We took dancing lessons together, rode bicycles all over, took piano lessons together and just had a great time. Gail was a year older, so she found out about other boys and pretty soon I was on my own again. I remember that she thought that Elvis was really great. Sixth grade was to be the beginning of the end of my childhood.

The Grange

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My parents were members of the Grange - a farmer's organization established during the reconstruction years by seven Freemasons. The story goes that a Yankee farmer was asked by President Lincoln to come to the south and see what could be done to ease the plight of farmers. The man's name was Oliver Kelley and he did as he was asked by the president. Of course when he presented himself to the rural communities he was shunned and ridiculed as a carpetbagger. He could find no family to take him in nor anyone to give or even sell him food. One night, thoroughly depressed, he knocked at the gate of a farm and when the farmer sent him on his way, he used one of the secrets of Freemasonry to see if the farmer would recognize that. He was immediately brought into the farm house, fed and bedded down for the night. The next day he pled his case with the farmer and they subsequently visited other farmers and decided that the nation needed a fraternal organization of farmers and hence the Grange was formed.

We belonged to Woodlawn Grange and there must have been at least a hundred members. Every month Mamma would make a covered dish and we would go to the Grange meeting to share our food with others. It was the best darn eating that anyone could have. We learned quickly that Mrs. Jones made the best pound cakes - but the worst fried chicken. Mrs. Sperry could make a mean macaroni pie and Mrs Foster made a spice cake that was out of this world wonderful. After the meeting the grownups would "open the Grange" using a secret ritual and the kids would play in another part of the building. Fun days those were.

We also went to the State Grange meetings in August every year. There was always lots of politicking, oration, arguments and debates. We also had contests - knitting, canning, photography, art, etc. in which everyone vied for Blue, Red and White ribbons signifying First, Second or Third place in the contest. The winners also got a check. Sometimes there was a pink ribbon for honorable mention.

The Grange was like a large snowball rolling downhill in those days. Years later it was like a snowball headed for hell. All the old folks passed away and the youngsters went to work in town and by 1969 the organization was mostly gone. It stayed around for a few more years but in South Carolina at least it is now just a memory.

The Lowly Persimmon

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Ahhhh! The Persimmon. A plant species that abounds in the South. As you drive through South Carolina, you will note pastures with luxurious growths of miniature trees with glossy leaves that scatter in clumps across the landscape. These most likely are Persimmon trees of the family Ebenaceae or Ebony. The wood is quite dense and the fibers are interwoven to make this one of the toughest in the world. In the days of wooden golf clubs, most Woods were made of Persimmon.

What is not so obvious when you see the clumps of bushes is that each time you see a thicket of them - maybe a quarter acre - they are all the same plant interconnected by tough roots. They spread quickly in pastures and are unconcerned with cutting and poisoning. If you cut one it comes back from the root. If you poison one, the leaves may fall off but you really haven't accomplished anything - it lives on. Some say that if cut during "Ember Days" in very late summer they will die. Since nobody seems to be able to pinpoint the Ember period anymore, nobody really knows if this will kill trees.

In addition to tough, dense wood, the Persimmon has one other redeeming quality - the fruit. The soft, sweet potato orange, pudding-like fruit is quite beautiful in August and in September it appears ripe and ready for eating. Almost every Southern boy keeps his eyes on the lowly persimmon during this time and when the time is right invites one of his dear friends from town to partake in the Persimmon Harvest Festival. Much time and effort is put into discussing the effacacies of the lowly fruit. The newbie must learn to identify the best persimmon, to pluck and peel back the skin just so and to avoid the hard seeds therein. His mouth begins to water for this delicacy and his heart to yearn. There are so many of them! Finally he is allowed to taste one. He bites into it gently and begins to chew and "Holy Moly - WHAT THE HELL IS THIS!!!!" Unfortunately for him he has "bitten into" one of the oldest jokes in American Agriculture. Persimmon fruit is noxious and astringent. Plainly put, the fruit will "pucker you up" to the point that you think your mouth is going to close up forever. The taste and effect last for what seems like hours and finally wears off so that you can talk and question the parentage, sexual pursuits, intelligence and charity of the farm boy. However, once tasted, you become a trusted member of the club and are empowered to initiate other victims - uh, "uninlightened."

Later on - say in October - the fruit becomes almost bearable and is a good source of fiber, protein, carbohydrates and tannin. At that point persimmons are eaten by some and collected by others to make "persimmon beer" - a sweet, orange "near beer". During times of economic depression, the fruit becomes a friend to the hungry. There's a story about my Uncle Jake - that he broke his arm eating breakfast one morning. He fell out of a persimmon tree!

The Third Grade

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Miss Loree Reeves. A stern looking, straight backed, well built woman with gray hair and a mouth like George Washington's. A stern purveyor of elementary education. I just "googled" her and she's not there. Part of me wonders how someone who had as much input into my life as Miss Reeves doesn't have thousands of pages about her. Somehow though, I think she would prefer not being on the web.

When she was my third grade teacher, she seemed to have been at least 70 years old. She continued to teach for many more years. I suspect she was in her 90's when she finally gave it up. She taught in a second floor classroom down the hall from the office where Mr. Stewart kept his straps and hard wooden chairs and probably some midieval devices such as thumb screws and iron maidens. Miss Loree didn't need Mr. Stewart or any of his devices. She had a wooden ruler, a yardstick and a metal ruler.

"Put your hand on the desk," was a chilling note. You knew that one or the other devices of torture was about to play hell with the back of your hand. For some reason none of us that I remember never refused to place our hands in the danger zone. We probably had no idea that we could refuse! Then the whacking started. It was never as bad as you expected - I think she knew that the public humiliation part of it was more punishment than the WHACK of the ruler. We all dreaded the metal ruler until we found out that it was ALL noise and very little pain.

Miss Loree introduced homework into our lives and I learned quickly that for some reason - probably genetic - I would not do homework. Beat me with a strap; put me in the iron maiden; make me miss recess every day of my life: I would not do homework. I think she could have probably rid me of that minor personality maladjustment at that point in my life and I would have become great and famous - but no, she knew that I retained everything and didn't actually need to do homework, so she finally gave up. Not doing homework has followed and haunted me all the days of my life.

Our Food

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I have mentioned food several times in past entries, but think that we should dedicate a day just to the things we ate and loved - mostly! Entrees were generally: Pot Roast, Fried Chicken, Fried Pork Chops, Hamburgers, Fried Round Steak, Fried Liver, Pork Roast, Beef Stew - both brown and red, Chicken and Dumplings, Ham, Pan Grilled Steaks, Spaghetti and fried fish. Sides were green beans, butterpeas, butterbeans, okra, corn, salad greens, collards, rice, potatoes, biscuits and cornbread. Not a whole lot of variety, but enought to get us by.

Mamma made good cornbread and biscuits. She used our own lard and buttermilk as much as possible in their making. She thought that small biscuits were more genteel, so we had biscuits about the size of a silver dollar (though they were usually about one inch thick. We seldom ate "Loaf Bread" from the store, but once in a while we would have a loaf of Sunbeam white bread. (Did I forget to mention banana sandwiches?)

I just remembered a "pate" made from hog liver that we called Liver Pudding. Almost everyone loved it - except of course, me. I did not like "souse meat" either. Souse meat was made by cooking, and then preserving in the natural jelly, those parts of the pig that would not have been eaten otherwise. I found out later that in the Pennsylvania area they call the stuff "scrapple."
Desserts were wonderful. Peach, Apple, Blackberry pies and cobblers, cakes and cookies, puddings and jello were more or less expected after a heavy meal.

I do not remember Mamma keeping anything like potato chips or other snacks around the house in those days.

The Pond

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When I was nine or so Daddy got some money from the government to build a pond. It wasn't really big - maybe an acre - but it was the first standing body of water on our place. Daddy had it stocked with Bream and Bass and we waited for them to grow. There were tadpoles galore the first year and then when summer came, we had bullfrogs. If you have never heard a bullfrog bellow, it can be a scary thing and we had hundreds of them.


It wasn't long before Daddy and Mac were gigging frogs. I won't go into the gruesome details, but there should have been a lot of little froggie sized wheelchairs involved. Mamma agreed to cook the froglegs, but when she put them in the hot frying pan they started jumping around. That did it right there - she didn't care if the frog wasn't attached to the legs, she couldn't cook something that was moving around. They compromised and Mac would start cooking the legs and she would finish. The froglegs were very tasty as I remember - and they didn't remind me of "chicken."

As is nature's way, the abundance of frogs attracted an abundance of snakes. They were actually Red Water Snakes, but we all thought they were of the Cottonmouth variety and were deathly afraid of them. If they had been poisonous we would have been in a lot of trouble because Red Water Snakes are very agressive. Several times, as I remember, I gave all my surroundings to a snake. Once, Dan Hardy and I gave a boat to one of them. I don't recall anyone getting bitten, but I recall a lot of close calls.

When the fish got big enough the fishing frenzy started. We caught bream after bream and ate them. Then, we learned from my cousin Mitchell and his dad Carrol how to catch Bass and we caught and ate them too! I spent many a day around that pond.

Other people asked for permission to fish and Daddy let them and soon there were always several people at the pond. One afternoon Daddy got his minnow bucket and rod and reel and headed to the pond to fish. He was fishing away when a guy came up and told Daddy he had to leave because this was "his" fishing place. Daddy went to the house and got the .22 rifle and cleaned the pond off. For several years nobody but family were allowed to fish in our ponds.

Trains

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Where our road crossed the Southern Railroad was a bridge. Not just any bridge; but a bridge with a name - Moonlight Bridge. It was made all of creosote timbers and on hot days you could find your way there just by the creosote smell. To me it was a magic place - far enough from home to be safe from parents - close enough to ride to on a bicycle and a serene place to hide and daydream. Serene that is until the morning or afternoon run of the Southern came through. At that point it was an adventurous place - loud and dangerous with rail cars almost near enough to touch.


Rail cars went everywhere - Augusta, Atlanta, Charlotte, Columbia - exotic places that I hardly ever saw. The cars were laden with coal, bananas, pulpwood, gravel and anything you could imagine. Sometimes the train would deposit a car or cars on the siding near our property and if the seal on the door was already broken, you could sneak aboard to see what was in it. Sometimes it would be the bananas left over from unloading. Then we would have bananas - green ones to keep for a week or two, ripe ones for eating, making ice-cream or puddings. Mamma would bake and fry bananas or coat them with mayonnaise and roll them in nuts for a "banana log." Soon after finding a nearly empty banana car we would find ourselves tired of bananas and ready to move on.


Once there was a wreck of the P&N right in front of our house. We heard the cars crashing and impacting with the earth in a very long, loud noise that seemed to last forever. The next morning I went over to the site and will never forget seeing the power of a train wreck. Cars were strewn on both sides of the railway. Some of them were dug into the ground up to six feet or so and some were in splinters. Nobody was hurt or killed in the crash - the engineer lost his job though. The story was that he had been nipping at the brown drinkin' likker all the way from Anderson and forgot about the tight curve coming into our area. The rails gave way and the train stopped prematurely.

Mamma's Kitchen

Mamma was a good, journeyman cook. I've always tried to cook like she did. As early as six years old, she had me in the kitchen teaching me to cook. No, as a six to to ten year old I didn't slave in the kitchen, but she talked to me about cooking as she went along. Mamma said that if a man could cook he would never go hungry, so I tried to learn and I helped out with the stirring and cooking. The big test came when I was about 11, she went to the hospital for a while and I did the cooking for the family and the field hands. I was very proud of my performance.

Now don't get me wrong here, Mamma was still a step or two ahead of everyone else when it came to cooking too. She even belonged to the local Home Economics Club sponsored by Clemson College (yep, even Clemson was a college in those days.) The name of the club Mamma joined was The Ellis Heights Home Economics Club. I always wondered about that name, "Who was Ellis?", and where were the heights? I found the answer 40 years later when I was training at Fort Riley Kansas. One of the housing areas on the ridge above the old base was named "Ellis Heights." Someone in our area at some time must have been stationed there and liked the name. The Clubs in those days weren't all about telling housewives to wash their hands and cook their eggs and hamburger well done. In addition to learning about running a tight ship at home, they observed pleasantries and shared recipes and once in a great while had a national meeting in exotic places like Louisville Kentucky.

The club system changed a lot in the 60's and most of the members just stopped going. Mamma still tried new recipes and if she didn't like them, threw them out the back door for the dogs. If the dogs wouldn't eat them we understood; but my brother and I always fussed when she did that. I remember several things that she and I did together later in life that were pretty good. We made a plum pudding (which is actually a drunken fruitcake - steamed, not baked.) There was a beef roast done in strong coffee - the dogs took a while to get rid of the evidence - and another beef roast cooked encased in a pound of rock salt. It wasn't bad.

I carry on Mamma's love of cooking and trying new exotic things to this day.

P. S. I just did a spell check on this and found out that "Mamma" is really supposed to be spelled as "Mama". Go figure. I've done it wrong for 60 years, so I AIN'T changing now.

Miss Evelyn Martin

Ah, Miss Evelyn Martin. Such a buxom lass for a second grader to fall for. Miss Martin was a soprano in the Metropolitan Opera before she decided to return home to Greenwood and help the little ones through a tough year. The only scene I vividly remember from the second grade classroom was when I was given an "F" for a drawing. Even at that young and tender age I demanded to know just how any critic could give a budding artist a thumbs down for his best effort. Alas my love for her was blunted by her effete criticism.

Then there was the lunchroom. At Magnolia, it was located in a little white house surrounded by the playground. One could smell it as it was approached. The food was adequate, but the menu deserved some attention. Item: I do not and I will not ever, ever consume spinach in any way. The same goes for liver. How COULD you serve spinach and liver to second graders and expect them to eat it. Alas, we were required to clean our respective plates before joining our classmates at recess. Miss Martin would take charge of a recalcitrant young scholar whose plate was marked by the presence of some offending victual and attempt to force said swill into the scholar's mouth. Now, I had a couple of tricks up my sleeve - or at least in my cuff. We wore blue jeans every day and our mothers would purchase said jeans a little long to allow for growth. The solution to the extra length was a turned up cuff from one to five inches depending on the time of year and the growth state of the kid.

I have always been the type of person who can make use of almost anything to solve a problem. So, those cuffs soon began to hold the liver and spinach for eventual egress to the playground and covert dumping of the offending crud to be scuffed into the sand. She caught me. I don't know how. It may have been the gravy dripping through the fabric - or the unlikely pouch formed by the swill. It too may have been the god-awful smell of my trousers in the classroom after lunch. Anyhow, she decided to sit with me and force me to eat everything. I'm sure she told the lunchroom to prepare unappetizing lunches every day for a week. Caught, scruffed and forced to eat, I relented. She shoved the fork full of spinach into my mouth and I decorated her cleavage with all the milk, roast beef, carrots and one forkful of spinach contained in me. I never had to eat spinach again.

The Farm

The farm was the largest piece of land imaginable to a young lad living there. We were taught to know the boundaries early on - the woods behind our bottom, the slave built rock wall on the back side of the back pasture and the fence along the Purvis place on the north. A quick trespass once in a while was OK, but we tried not to get caught.

Daddy was always looking for pasture land to rent, so we usually had another hundred or two acres to roam as well. When we rented land, we had to get the cows there so we just pushed them out the gate and drove them to the new place along the road. All the back roads were dirt and you hardly ever saw more than one or two cars in an hour. One of the places that he rented was a six mile drove.

In the late 1950's Daddy bought the "Mitchell Place" from TJ Mitchell and we added another hundred acres to our land. The new land was grown over and hardly useable for anything but woodland grazing for the cows. We spent about a year building fences and then turned the cows loose there. There was about 40 acres that we didn't fence and in 1958 the government paid us to plant that acreage in pines and leave it outside our grazing land. They actually paid us every year to "not farm" that piece of land. I always told people from the city that the Feds were paying us not to plant tomatoes.

The land is just the same size today that it was back then, but it seems a lot smaller...

The Old Red Barn and Cats

We had hundreds of cats over the years after Tom left us. Hardly a one of them had a name. They were mostly wild, living in our big red barn and eating the skimmed milk that we put out for the hogs. Whenever Mamma would go out to hang out clothes she would be mobbed by cats rubbing around her ankles and begging for food. Anyway, we finally sold the last milk cow and killed our last hog and were left with about 75 cats who were looking for a handout. It took most of a year, but they finally went away to someone else's milk barn.

And then came the rats. Not mice - rats. Some of them were as big as a chihaua dog and one of them could pretty much ruin 50 pounds of grain in one night. Mac bought some really small .22 rimfire cartridges and would sit in the feed room with the rifle and a light. Whenever he heard a rat scurrying around he would turn on the light and shoot the rat. It was an excellent idea which did not carry out very well. He may have killed a dozen or so, but we had RATS.

We all were a little scared to go in the barn with them. Daddy caught several black snakes and a King Snake and put them in the feed room, but I'm sure the rats consumed that fresh meat in less than a day. Finally, Daddy went to the farmers co-op and came back with some new rat poison called Warfarin. Mamma cut up about 4 pounds of pecans into tiny little pieces and Daddy mixed the poison with that. The rats literally came out of the woodwork - hundreds of them - and died in the grass outside the barn. (Do you take a blood thinner? Take a look at the label and see what's in it!)

Later that year we had a big wind storm and the barn was destroyed. We never built it back. Remind me to tell you the story about the hog that ate 14 sticks of dynamite...

Nightly Entertainment

My family didn't have a television while I was growing up. We had an AM/FM radio and at one time I had a "cat's whisker" shortwave radio that I built; but no TV. Each evening we would play cards Rummy, Poker, Blackjack, Go Fish or we would play Checkers, Chinese Checkers, Dominoes or Chess. Many evenings would be just for reading. Some evenings we would listen to the radio. The shows that I remember are Amos and Andy, Fibber McGee and Molly, Jack Benny, and The Shadow. And, at least once or twice a month we would go to the "picture show" at one of the two drive-in theaters or the State Theater on Main Street. Sometimes though, Mamma or Daddy (or both) would tell stories about their pasts. These were my favorite times - hearing Mamma talking about ghosts or Daddy talking about cutting timber or making whiskey.

I never was much good at games, but I liked to try. I figured that Chess would be the best game for me to learn to play since my father was a master at all the rest of them. We didn't have chess until I was in the sixth grade. In short order, he learned to beat me soundly every time the board came out but I continued trying. We would only play one game per night and when it was over, I was furious and he was ready to move on. Between the eighth and ninth grades I found a chess book at the library and I studied it much harder than I did any of my lessons at any time. One night the chess board came out and within a few minutes I had beaten him. We had to play another game right then and I did it again. I think he was proud of me, but he wanted to see the book too, so I showed it to him. After that we were about even in Chess. He could always give me a drubbing at anything else.

I remember my Dad working my brother's college trigonometry problems on the floor of our living room with a carpenter's square and a folding rule. His education had ended in the tenth grade of a one room school in the woods of McCormick County. He didn't understand anything about trig, but he could solve any problem that came up. He always said that he could weigh a bale of cotton with a carpenter's square, but I never saw him do it. I wish I had gotten a little more of his problem solving ability.

First Grade

First grade came in September of 1953. I had been 6 years old for less than 30 days when school started, but made it in under the wire for age restrictions. I was to be reminded that I was younger than my peers for the next 12 years. That was OK with me. Mamma and I rode the school bus to Magnolia School that morning. I still remember going in by the front steps and going to the auditorium for the "sorting." About 40 of us were selected for Miss Shealy's first grade class and we moved in a line to the classroom. Mamma faded away at that point and I was on my own. I will always remember the kid in front of me because of his obviously super scrubbed very pink neck. His neck was like that all that year. I sat in the next to the last seat in the last row of the classroom.

When we started out, Nita sat behind me, but later on she was moved to my left and Johnny was moved behind me. He and I developed a fairly close relationship that lasted all the way through public school. Other people that I remember in that room were Gay and Thomas. Thomas was to become my best friend for the first six years and Gay was a girl that everyone fell in love with as soon as they saw her. She eventually married one of my college roommates.

I couldn't read when I started, but Miss Shealy introduced me to reading by putting a big easel full of Dick and Jane right in front of me and within a couple of days I was ready to go. "Run Spot Run! See Spot Run!" I still remember "getting it." I don't know if we did any arithmetic in that class or not. I do remember pictures of balls with stars on them. Maybe that was about learning to count. First grade wasn't bad and I'd like to know what happened to Miss Shealy. If she was 21 in 1953, that would make her 76 years old now...

Lets take a moment for a silent prayer for the souls lost on Normandy Beach on this day sixty five years ago.

Our Town

Our local town, Greenwood is located in the upstate of South Carolina at the intersection of a number of railroad lines. I remember the C&WC, P&N, Southern and Seaboard rail lines. Now t here's only Seaboard. Greenwood was the home of Greenwood Mills - a very large Cotton Processing company that made a spectrum of different fabrics from parachute cloth to typewriter ribbons. Many of the railroads and most of Greenwood Mills are but memories today. Interstate Highways replaced a large part of rail shipping and most textile companies are either closed or have moved to the third world for cheap labor.

Greenwood was noted for having the widest Main Street in the world. In fact, Main Street was almost as wide as it was long!! Almost all mercantile, drug and other stores in Greenwood county were located around the square in town. I remember at least two restaurants - The Grill and the Star Cafe. Two drugstores - Smith's Drugstore on the west side and Hodges Drugstore on the east. There was a Gallant Belk, Penney's, Efird's and The Vogue for clothing, A Firestone store on the south side and a Western Auto on the east - each owned by a Leary Brother who were reported to be "Not on good terms with each other." On one side was the A&P Grocery and up the street on the same side was Timmerman's Grocery. For Men's Clothing there was Rosenberg's on one side and Fred Smith's on the other. There was also Rykard's Army Store near the end of the square. There were more stores and buildings - Mayes Jewelers (with Hoyt Faulkner's Barbershop downstairs) Smitty's Pawn Shop, The Grier Building on one side and The Textile Building on the other. Of course there was (and still is) a county bank and McCaslan's Bookstore. On the northwest corner was the 5 story Oregon Hotel building which is now the Greenwood Building.

Greenwood was a nice big town in those days. I didn't realize just how small the town was until Mamma and I went to Greenville with Mrs. Adams and Beth. I couldn't believe it! I remember that trip that we ate at the S&S Cafeteria and that I had Baked Cod. Then, the first time that we went to Atlanta I was really amazed!

A typical day around the farm in summer started around 7:00 with a breakfast of Ham or Sausage, Grits and eggs.  After eating we would fuel up the old Farmall Cub tractor and if it was raining, wipe out the magneto case so it would be dry enough to crank.  Then we had to get the crank from under the seat and put it in the slot in front of the tractor and "CRANK" it by spinning the handle around.  Usually it started on the second or third spin.  You had to be careful or the engine would "kick back" and the crank would break your arm. The Cub had 3 forward gears and a reverse - no hydraulics at all, you had a spring assisted lift lever.  It would fairly fly in third gear, but it wouldn't pull unless it was in first or maybe second. 

Sometimes we would hitch up the wagon and pick up rocks in the pastures.  You would put the tractor in low gear with the throttle almost closed and just let the tractor slowly wander over the field while you walked behind and picked up rocks to put in the moving trailer.  When you judged that you had a full load, you would have to "catch" the tractor by jumping up on the moving wagon tongue and climbing over the seat to proceed to wherever the rocks were needed.  In the '50's we had a lot of 8 to 10 foot deep gulleys that needed filling so the rocks would always have a place to go.

Other days we took the axes and chopped bushes - persimmon, locust, sweetgum, etc - that grew in the pastures.  Chopping bushes with an axe is definitely work.  You have to learn to pace yourself and slowly mow them down one by one.  If you attack bushes with a madly flying axe, you will burn out in less than an hour.  Our hired hand named Gus taught me the knack of going slow and lasting the whole day.

As I grew older, I could hitch up the sickle mower to the tractor and cut everything in my way.  One day I was mowing along on the field above the pond and hit a huge nest of red wasps.  Theory was that if you didn't move, they wouldn't sting you.  I'm not sure that's true because I couldn't sit still. As I was dodging around getting stung around the head and ears, I fell off the tractor, hit the ground and got up running. Thank God I fell behind the sickle mower!  I ran right into the pond and finally lost the swarm.  The tractor continued merrily mowing along until it hit a tree on the edge of the field and choked down.  There was no damage, so none of this was reported back at the house.

Other days there were jobs like picking up the hay and putting it in the barn, building or repairing barbed wire fence, cutting posts, cutting firewood, chasing cows, hoeing the garden, catching chickens for cooking, gathering eggs, churning butter, shelling peas and butterbeans, and on and on!

Other Neighbors

We had other neighbors as well as the ones I've described.  There was the Grover Adams family that lived on Highway 25.  Mr. Adams was a carpenter by trade and one of the most precise individuals that I ever knew.  He wore his work clothes as if he were ready for church at any time - not fancy duds, but clean and ironed and carried well by a gentleman.  Mrs Louise Adams was one of those little ladies that you just had to love.  She referred to her husband as Mr. Adams and would go out of her way to make you feel at home - even if you were a little kid.  Their daughter, Elizabeth was quiet and stately.  She was a physics and chemistry teacher at our High School and a brilliant individual.  She taught me to develop and print photographs and tried to teach me physics.  I was not capable of physics in my teenage state and regret dropping her class to this day.

There were the Lathrens, the Murphy's, the Purvis' and the Mitchells whom I visited at various times.  Mrs. Murphy (Florence was her name) tried valiantly to teach me to play piano.  I really hated piano and eventually just refused to go back to her house.  I don't think that Mrs. Murphy was upset about my decision.  There's just so much patience in a woman!

For a couple of years I tried to sell GRIT newspapers.  If I worked hard enough and long enough, I could sell about 24 papers on a Saturday.  That amounted to about 48 cents profit.  There's no regret there, just wonderment that a 10 year old would pedal a bicycle for 10 miles for less than a half dollar.  Maybe a lot of those stories about my elevator not going all the way to the top were more factual that many thought!

I never broke a window in anyone's home with a baseball nor trampled in their flowerbeds, but I did sneak on their land from time to time to purloin watermelons, cantelopes, an ear of corn here and there and of course apples and pears when they were ripe.  

The Cows

We didn't butcher our own cows because figuring out what to do with 500 pounds of beef is a little daunting.  When we were able to afford a freezer, Daddy bought one from Greenwood Supply.  It was a chest type Hotpoint and lasted for many years.  With a freezer, we could do lots of things that we couldn't earlier.  Mamma froze green beans, (Yuck!) Field Peas (OK), Corn (very good) and the beef and pork (Yum!)

Daddy always kept about 50 brood cows and at least one bull.  He liked the Hereford breed, but also had some Shorthorns and Red Devons.  There were a couple of Brown Swiss to help improve the milk production in the herd and we usually kept one Jersey or Gurnsey for milking.  With 50 cows, you could expect 35 or 40 calves per year and all of the wonderful work that went along with them.  The bulls had to be made into "not bulls" and all of them needed Blackleg vaccinations.  Sometimes we removed the horns from the calves, but that was a pretty ugly thing and it didn't last long.  

Some of the cows in those days had names.  They wore names like Queen Anne, Princess Elizabeth, Cherry, "The Droopy Horned Cow", and a bunch of others that I don't remember now.  I especially remember Cherry, because if you weren't careful, she would attempt to stomp a mudhole in you.  She chased me once and I had to learn the lesson of not running from cows.  While Daddy was alive we didn't have a mean bull.

The other thing that I remember about cows was getting the hay bales up and put in the barn and then during the winter taking them out at the rate of 20 or so per day to feed the cows. The hay would be placed on the 4 wheel wagon or on the back of a truck and doled out one block at a time.  Sometimes we just carried the bales to the field and spread them around.  We still feed cows, but we have the large 800 pound bales now and we unroll them with the tractor.

By the way, as of today, Ma and I have been married for 41 wonderful years!!

Wild Berries

We picked a lot of our own friuts, berries and vegetables out of the fields. Our garden was about a fourth of an acre and we spent lots of time in it from early spring until fall.  We had corn, okra, butterbeans, green beans, squash, cucumbers, field peas, asparagus, boysenberries and a variety of mustard and turnip greens.  There were wild blackberries, strawberries and muscadines as well.  They grew in the fields between the Southern and P&N railroads which were about 50 yards apart for several miles along our road.  Strawberries were usually ripe right about Mother's Day, the blackberries were ready in late June and July and the muscadines ripened in the fall.

Picking berries was an ordeal.  There were snakes, wasps, bees, chiggers and mosquitos everywhere the berries were.  And I can't forget the blackberry briars.  In order to get to the "best berries" you had to get right into the middle of the blackberry patch.  That always resulted in painful scratches.  So, in order to get the delicacies, you had to get really hot and sweaty, be bitten by a variety of bugs and animals and risk infection from painful briar scratches. But we all thought the prize worth the effort.

The wild strawberries were about the size of M&M's and required, picking and capping.  A 10 quart bucket of berries, caps and stems  would yield about 4 quarts of berries.  Mamma made strawberry pies, jam and ice cream.  The jam was put up in 8 ounce jelly glasses and covered with melted parafin.  You could take that jam and put it on a hot buttered biscuit and have probably the most delicious breakfast ever tasted by humans.  We made a lot of blackberry pies and Mamma made jelly out of the blackberries so that there were no seeds to get in Daddy's teeth.  The muscadines were mainly for eating, but Mamma made wine out of some and also made a concentrate of the juice to mix with water to make a kind of soft drink for us kids. The wine was made by mixing enough sugar in the muscadine juice to float an egg.  Then the juice would ferment for a couple of weeks and get bottled and capped.  In the winter, the wine would be brought out for stomach aches and rarely for some sort of celebration.  As I remember it, the wine was very sweet and not very alcoholic at all.

One quick wine story...  Mamma made some blackberry wine one summer and bottled it in some gin bottles that she found somewhere.  The bottles were stored on the top shelf our her and Daddy's closet.  Later on in the summer we took an overnight trip to the mountains and when we came home there was a definite Mogan David smell in their bedroom.  The wine had continued to ferment until one of the bottles literally blew up and drenched all their clothes with very sweet and sticky wine.  There was no church for us that Sunday!