The Missing Years

Image by Kim Smith via Flickr

I would say that from sixth grade until High School graduation were my "missing years." For a very long time I didn't like me, I didn't like school, I didn't like being at home and I pretty much didn't like anything except band classes and being with my friends in the band.

Things got better when I was introduced into the 601st Militia. The "601" was where, by playing, I began to grow up. There's nothing like a bullet whizzing past you that wakes you up and makes the world a sweeter place to live in. It makes a whirring-buzzing-zinging that isn't fairly represented by the background noise in movies. A bullet in the air near you has a real presence and once you hear one you'll know what I'm talking about. Going on raids with my group was a lot like "playing war" with a good dose of reality wrapped up in it. It is really a good thing that we did not have access to stable explosives.

Things got really better when I met Patricia Anne Langley. How we could have existed for so many years, living 3 miles from each other, being in the same grade level at school and sometimes riding the same bus is almost astonishing. But, in my senior year at Greenwood High I went to a Christmas party and there she was! We dated and by March we were "going steady."

Pat has always been the rock that I could depend upon to steady me and keep me going when I would rather not. She is a jewel of great value and anything that I have accomplished in life tracks back to my love for her. Pat is a quiet, loving wife, mother and grand-mother whose very presence nourishes our lives.

We went steady for over three years and married on June 2, 1968. Pat taught school while I worked in the mill and continued my education. While I was working over 56 hours a week on varied shifts in the mill, trying to run a farm with 135 head of cattle and taking 18 hours of classes at Lander we managed to see one another once in a while.

Remember that in 1968 the war in Viet Nam was already hot and getting hotter. If you didn't have a real good reason; your draft classification was 1-A and within a month a letter came in the mail indicating that your friends and neighbors had chosen you to be inducted into the military for two years of involuntary service. Everybody dreaded that letter and did what they could to avoid being drafted.

Instead of going into the draft, you could join the National Guard or the Reserves. So I drove down to the National Guard armory and noted that the line for volunteers was several blocks long. There were only 10 openings... Going back to the Canteen at Lander to participate in my morning game of poker; I ran into the friendly Air Force recruiter. He said, "How would you like to be up in the air dropping bombs on the Viet Cong instead of in the jungle smelling them?" I said OK and the first thing I knew, I was sworn in to the United States Air Force with a reporting date of July 3, 1969. The missing years were then over. I remember everything from that day forward.

Hunting - With Apologies to Sandy

Image by cj berry 2009 via Flickr

We hunted more for sport than for food, but we didn't waste the food either. Mac and I would go hunting some Saturdays and we would tramp through the woods with Flip the squirrel dog and let the dog do most of the work. Flip would spot a squirrel, run it up a tree and then spot where it was hiding on a limb and point it out for one of us to shoot. We used a .22 rifle to save the meat and always tried for a "head shot." Some days we would come home with 3 or 4 squirrels. We would then clean them and give them to Mamma who would put them in a dishpan in salty water and soak them overnight before either frying for breakfast or stewing for dinner. I remember the squirrel and dumplings was a family favorite, but I don't remember eating a whole lot of it. I did eat fried squirrel and fried rabbit whenever we had it.

I seldom hunted with Daddy. He didn't like to roam around hunting - he preferred to sit silently in one place and wait for the game to come to him. It must have been effective, because he always came home with game. He only hunted with a .22 rifle. I never saw him with a shotgun unless he was trying to get blackbirds out of his planted fields. One time he killed over a hundred starlings with two shots from a 16 guage. Daddy told us that when he was very young - and when everyone was very hungry, the whole family would go out at night and surround bushes and drop a blanket over each bush and collect the birds that were under it for eating. It didn't matter what kind of birds they were either. I remember him saying that Crow tastes a lot like chicken!

As I've probably mentioned earlier, there were no deer in our area then. Deer had been hunted out of the area well before the War Between the States. The only SC deer were in the "low country." Someone brought us some deer meat from a hunt in the low country and Mamma fried it and covered it with gravy. I really liked it.

Sometimes we would catch a turtle or two and make a stew. The story that was most often told was that "there are 7 kinds of meat on a turtle!" I never knew because I wouldn't touch it.

I remember that sometime in 1957 a "flu bug" made its rounds in our area. It was called the "Asian Flu" and the connotations were that it came from China and might be a biological attack on our country. I remember it like this: Tommy Cothran and I were building a rabbit box. Think of a wooden box 3 feet long, 12 inches high and 9 inches wide. The door to the box slid up and was attached to a trigger device. You simply had to find a place to put the box - preferably near a rabbit trail and bait it with fruit. Then you went home and waited for the rabbit to go in, trip the trigger and be caught. You usually made rounds of your rabbit boxes early in the morning and brought the rabbits back to Mamma before breakfast.

Anyway, we were making a rabbit box and around 4 o'clock that afternoon I started feeling bad. Kind of droopy and achy. I kept building the box and when it was complete I walked in and told Mamma that I had to go to bed. Just like that it was on. Everybody in the family caught the flu and everybody was the sickest that any of us remember. We couldn't even go to the doctor and he couldn't come to our house because there were so many cases. He just told Mamma that everyone should take Bufferin every two hours until the fever broke. I had never heard of Bufferin until that day and we all thought is was a wonder drug. It sure helped the fever and the aches.

At one point we were all so sick we just stayed in bed and helped Mamma remember when it was time for Bufferin. Eventually, we all made it through and recovered.
Now we know that the "Asian Flu" was an Avian strain called H2N2 and it eventually mutated into H3N2 which caused the 1969 outbreak, or "mini-pandemic." I'll chat about H3N2 when I'm talking about the Air Force later on.

What did we do with the rabbits? We ate them!!

Wood Heating

To me, there is no better heating system than one fired by wood. The smell of wood smoke is definitely better than that of coal - even though coal makes a hotter fire. I've never tried burning cow chips or charcoal to heat a house, but I'll bet that wood smells better.

Wood warms you two times. You get warm when you're cutting, splitting and hauling; and you get warm when you burn the wood. I remember wood gathering parties that started early on a saturday morning when the temperature was in the low 20's that made you want to get a tree on the ground fast so that you could start working on it and stop freezing! On those mornings the chain saw would balk and sputter and finally crank. Sometimes we had to mix kerosene with the chain oil to make it flow down the blade.

When I was between 6 and 12 we only cut wood with manual saws and axes. Two people on a cross cut saw can fell a tree fairly quickly - perhaps in 10 or 15 minutes. But then you have to cut it into useable lengths. We had a cutoff saw near the house that would run off the PTO of the Cub tractor, but you had to get the wood to the saw and that was work.

Later, after Daddy died, Mac bought a Homelite chainsaw, and then a Poulan and then another Poulan. With one of those we could cut and split a truckload in an hour or so. We still had to split the wood with axes and mauls, but it was good wood and a lot easier to get. Then Ben bought a Husqvarna and a motorized splitter and we could really cut and split woodl. We have burned a lot of firewood in this family in the past half-century.

Fencing

Image via Wikipedia

Fencing in my world never had anything to do with swords, sabers or epees. Fencing to us was an exercise in installing a long piece of wire which had been made dangerous by the embedding of sharp spikes into it every four inches or so. This wire had to be stretched really, really tight between the supports. Now, I say supports instead of fenceposts because on our farm you used everything available - like trees, big shrubs, rocks and etc. to support the wire. If you could stick an inch and a half wire staple in it, you did. There were no queensbury rules about repairing fences either - just mission accomplishment. The mission in all cases was to keep cows on the correct side of the fence.

Barbed wire fences have many enemies. It is really not unusual for a tree which is leaning away from the fence at a 45 degree angle to suddenly reverse its lean and fall directly on the wire. In such cases the repair involves a chainsaw and several posts. The wire, being stretched significantly by the tree becomes very loose in all directions and must be tightened. There is not enough wire present to join together with a twist, so you must always patch in a short piece of wire - making the resultant fence an engineering marvel, but an artist's eyesore. Other enemies of fences are hunters who wreck them for no reason at all, bulls and large cows who just have to have the grass on the other side and time which rusts the most expensive wire and rots the most resilient posts. If you own one mile of exterior (or perimeter) fence; odds are that at any given moment there is a weak spot or hole in it. Many times the hole will be large enough for 5 cows to elope with the neighbor's bull at the same time.

A cow that leaves through a hole in the fence will remember that place and return home - most of the time. However, before the prodigal decides to "make nice" she will generally leave a large pile of cow droppings in someone's rosebed, or trample an acre of sweet corn in order to get to the other side, or especially if she is completely black in color, she will have to stand in the road at night. And most neighbors and motorists are really not that understanding. A lot of times they want you to pay them for the damages! Sometimes they incarcerate your cow in a barn and keep her until you fix or pay for the damages! Many times, county law becomes involved making any serenity that you may have go up in flames.

I guess I don't know which is the worse - cows or fences...

Wood Shop

Now I thought that I was pretty much an accomplished carpenter in the 8th grade - that is until I took wood shop. We all had to take it while the girls did something like Home Economics or whatever. Our first assignment was to take a block of wood and make it "square" using only hand saws, chisels and planes for cutting; and a framing square for measurements. We quickly learned that making something square was not the easiest thing in the world. Change this angle on this side and you change that angle (or those angles) on the other side(s.) It was really discouraging. I finally did it, but I had the feeling that the shop teacher just got tired of fooling with me.

Once we had the block of wood square, we were allowed to use some of the power tools to complete our "project." Mine was building a rifle rack and I messed with that for the rest of the semester. The other project we could have chosen was a shoeshine box. Thank goodness I didn't do that one! It had "several" pieces of wood more than the 4 pieces used for the rifle rack. I finally finished the rack and stained it dark brown (I think it was supposed to be walnut, but dark brown was about as good as it got.) Then I varnished and shellacked it and managed to get it home on the school bus. In any event, I must have passed the class.

I think that class did more to discourage me from selecting a career in the carpentry/building world than any thing else. Once I discovered I couldn't even square up an 8 inch long 2x4 board and then learning that I didn't have any woodworking skills made me consider teaching as a career. At least if I were teaching I wouldn't actually have to "DO" anything!!

The rifle rack disappeared at the same time as all my childhood mathoms. I left it all in my room at home when I left for the Air Force and never saw it again. Oh well...

Marblebutt and the Bra

Image by Janrito Karamazov via Flickr

It has been a while - memory and creativity certainly wax and wane. Let's see, where was I? Oh, in the middle of Northside Junior High School; setting a pattern for all future adolescents. It definitely was among the worst of times, but I'm sure there were some "best of times" involved as well.
Ah! The bra prank! I absolutely had no involvement whatsoever. I was just a very innocent bystander. Arriving on the bus one morning I was immediately approached by Ronnie and Guy who covertly pointed to the top of the school's flagpole. There in all it's glory waved a rather large brassiere, white in color and humongous in cup size. We basked in the hilarity of it all, trying to blend with the crowd who were beginning to notice and pass along this delicious prank to each other.

The front door of the school, which NEVER opened before the appointed time sprang open. Out rushed old Marblebutt the principal. He went straight to the flagpole, blushing a very bright red, lowered the offending garment and placed it under his suit coat. Then, still not speaking, he rushed back into the school with the entire student body laughing unto tears! What a glorious moment.

I will say this for the old man. He may have done some quiet sleuthing, trying to find the authors of the deed, but he never mentioned it again. That had to take some class. As for Ronnie and Guy, my guess is that some unsuspecting matron left her underwear on the line on Sunday night and seeing it waving there in the dark sparked a most ingenious plan.