Purple Robin

By Calvin Dirickson

Calvin Dirickson was born in 1938 and spent his early childhood in stark poverty. During his four year hitch in the navy he took writing courses. This is his second book to be published. He has completed writing his third and has begun on his forth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Aug 4, 2009
• ISBN: 9781426939471

Calvin Dirickson

Calvin Dirickson was born in 1938 and his early childhood was spent in stark poverty during the depression years. He grew up and graduated high school in Qulin, Missouri, a small farming town in Southeast Missouri. The next big step in his life was a tour in the U.S. Navy, two years in a pilot training squadron in Corpus Christi, Texas. He spent his last two years in the Navy's Fleet Intelligence Unit for Europe. He took creative writing courses while stationed in Corpus Christi. Calvin retired from Florida State University at the age of 63 and moved to Palm Gardens, Nevada.

Book preview

ONE

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It was August 1938 and the boot heel of Missouri was in its usual August weather pattern: hot and humid. In a three-room sharecropper’s shack, near Charleston, Missouri, Doctor James Moore, a roving country doctor, was trying to save a woman in childbirth. Several times he tried unsuccessfully to pull the child out by using forceps, but the child had turned blue from lack of oxygen and Dr. Moore was quite sure it was already dead. This was the woman’s fifth child and the good doctor feared that he was about to lose both of them.

Sweat drenched his shirt and ran down his face. After more than eight hours he was beginning to lose his strength from this long process. He couldn’t keep this up much longer, so he had little choice but to make a final drastic decision to cut the child into pieces to get it out, in a last ditch attempt to save the mother. As cruel as this may seem he was without any medical equipment and this was the only thing left for him to do. Reluctantly, he picked up a scalpel, took a long, deep, troublesome breath, exhaled loudly then slowly turned back to the sweat-drenched and exhausted mother to start the cutting. At that moment the mother gathered her last ounce of strength and with an ear-splitting scream of excruciating pain made a desperate final push and her huge twelve pound son was finally born. Immediately she began hemorrhaging. Moving quickly, Dr. Moore cut the birth cord then grabbed the blue lifeless child by the arm and slung it across the room out of the way so he could get to the enormous task of trying to save the mother.

The force of the child landing on his back, on another bed, expelled the fluid from his lungs and he was able to suck in air for his first breath of life. He let out a loud scream of protest from being taken from a warm comfortable womb and tossed across a cold dark room. Dr. Moore froze with horror when the child cried out; he had been seconds away from cutting the child into pieces. He became sick to his stomach at the thought and was so upset he was having a hard time concentrating on trying to save the mother. Finally,—even with his strength gone, he managed to save this amazingly strong and resilient woman.

I know all this to be true because my mother told me this was how I was born.

Thus began my long journey down life’s road. Like the rare Purple Robin, I am a rare species of man. My road has had many ups, downs, twists, turns and detours. Not really surprising, I guess, considering my extraordinary entrance into this world. To give you an idea of my unusually existence, early in life, I began having visions of disasters, death and financial gains. Arriving at midpoint a particular disaster caused me to completely change my life style. I know God has stayed with me all the way through my life no matter which forks in the road I have taken.

I am the youngest of four living children, my mother named me Calvin. When I was born my brother John was two, sister JoAnne four and oldest brother, Bill was six. Bill had a twin named Will who had been stillborn. It took Bill several days after my birth before he would come near my crib, but when he finally approached he asked Mother, What is that thing anyway? It was not long until he accepted me as part of the family and was carrying me around everywhere. Bill was always the man of the house when Dad was away.

My only playmate was my brother John.

As mentioned, the house I was born in was a three-room sharecropper’s shack with a small front porch and a screened in back porch. There was no electricity, so we used kerosene lamps for light. The bathroom was an outhouse in the backyard. Any water we used for washing, cleaning, drinking or any other purpose, had to be pumped from a hand pump located in the far corner of the backyard and carried into the house. We didn’t have much of a yard. The landowner needed all his land for growing crops. His cornfield came up within twenty feet of the house. But we did have a garden spot and a place for raising hogs and chickens to sell and/or butcher. With these bare necessities of life, Mother would still feed anyone that knocked on our door asking for food. Men still traveled the roads hitchhiking and riding the rails going anywhere they thought they could find work. I can vaguely remember playing with my nickel toy tractor that I had got for my second Christmas and helping mother gather eggs. For some reason I also remember the sweet aroma of hay in our small barn.

In the early 1930s, during the Depression, Dad worked on a farm for twenty five cents an hour. I remember many times Mother saying, We were better off living on the farm at least we could raise our own food. Living through the Depression, they knew nothing but the hardest of times. Our house was several miles from town and a mile from the closest neighbor. Dad had an old rickety truck, but gas was in short supply he would only go to town when it was really necessary. About the only food purchased from town were sugar, coffee and flour. We butchered our own meat, which consisted of pork and chicken. We couldn’t afford beef. Chickens were raised for eggs and meat, milk was bought from a neighbor. Mother always had a large garden and canned all our vegetables.

In the later 1930s when I was born the population of the United States was 129,824,939. The federal budget was $6.84 billion. The Depression was supposed to be over, but there were still eight million people out of work and unemployment was at 19 percent. The minimum wage was forty cents an hour but the wage and hourly laws did not include men working as farm hands.

My Dad came from a family of six children with Irish and German ancestors. The Irish was more dominant in Dad, Bill and me, we are redheaded, and light skinned and freckled. The German blood showed up in John and JoAnne their complexion and blond hair are typical German. Mother came from a family of twelve children and her jet black hair and high cheekbone came from her Cherokee ancestors. Her strong built and personality from her German bloodline. Both my parents had inherited the hardworking ethics passed down from their immigrant ancestors, which is certainly what they needed to raise a family during the Depression. My grandmother, on my Mother’s side was married three times and had children from all of her husbands. Most of my relatives on both sides lived in the boot heal of Missouri (South East Missouri). We all lived close enough to each other that on Sunday after church there would be a large family gathering. I can remember many a Sunday visiting with all my cousins. There was so many of us, there was always the inevitable arguments or fights.

The most memorable Sunday visit was when a gang of us cousins were visiting my grandparents on my Mother’s side, where they lived on a farm. Us kids were playing in the cow pasture and decided we would taste the salt block that was for the cattle. We all took a few licks off the block of salt. Our parents found out about it and were furious with us because grandfather had a sick cow that had died a few days before. Cattle need salt and surely this sick cow had been licking on this same block of salt that we had sampled. We all got our mouths washed out with soap and our backsides got a good switching

On my third birthday Mother made a chocolate cake for me. I was so excited I dived into it with both hands. There was no birthday present that year but I still had my tractor from my second Christmas.

We kids had to make our own toys to play with. I remember smashing a Prince Albert tobacco can, nailing it on a short stick, getting a small iron wheel off the hub of a wagon wheel, and pushing it around with a stick to make it roll. There was an art to guiding the wheel and keeping it up and rolling, it was a couple years before I mastered the art.

Grandfather surprised John and me a few days after my third birthday with toy army tanks. They were made of metal and had a wind up key. We had loads of fun playing with them. We would aim them at each other and see which tank could push the other backwards. There was a small dirt mound at the edge of the yard and we had great fun playing with them and watch the tanks climb up and over the hill. There was one particular August day when there was a hard summer shower. After an hour it stopped and the sun came out. As soon as the rain quit John and I went outside to play with our tanks. A mud hole had filled with water from the rain. We played all afternoon running our tanks thought the water which was deep enough that the tanks would go completely under water. We were having such a blast at the mud hole. A few days later when we went out to play with our new tanks, we could not wind them up. They had rusted inside; I was heartsick over the loss of my best and only toy. John tried squirting oil through small holes in the tanks to get them to work again, we let the oil soak over night and the next morning as soon as we got up we ran out to the back porch where our tanks were stored and tried to wind them up. No luck they still would not work.

I was three when Dad landed a job in construction building bridges. We moved to a small house a few miles out of Campbell, Missouri and at the foot of Crowley’s Ridge. This small house didn’t have a drivable road up to it. Only a set of wagon tracks led up from a dirt road. We had to walk a quarter of a mile from the house to the road where Dad parked his truck. Since we only lived there a few months there wasn’t much I remember about that place. I do vaguely remember that a neighbor lady fell dead in her chicken house. Mother took me up to the house where the body was laid out. I sat in the kitchen and did not go in where the body was. At that age I didn’t know what dying was all about.

In the early spring of 1942, I was a few months from being four and now had a good memory of events of my life. We were moving to Colorado Springs where Dad was hired as a construction laborer where a military base was being built. The move was cross-country in an old truck and the trip took several very long days. Not having the money for a motel room, we camped out every night. Camping out was a little boy’s dream and I loved sleeping in the tent with the whole family. Watching Dad build a campfire and Mother cooking over the open flame is a treasure that I will never forget. Most of the time there were other families traveling the same way and we camp together for protection. This was great as it meant there were plenty of kids for us to play with.

Dad rented a house for us at the foot of Pike Peak. It was a large five-room house and had spring water piped into the kitchen. This was great for us kids, no more pumping and carrying water to the house. The piping system was just two boards nailed together to make a V shaped trough and the water would run through the kitchen and out back to the creek. However the kitchen was the only place with the running water; the bathroom was still an outhouse at the edge of the backyard. We had a large yard, I could lie down, look straight up and see the snow on top of Pikes Peak. There were three bedrooms in the house, which was a luxury; we three boys had our own room. There was little furniture just the bed but we thought it was wonderful. What a giant step our family had made from living in the three-room sharecroppers shack.

There were four houses in the area where Dad had rented ours. They were in a row with a creek running behind them on it way down Pikes Peak. All the kids were told to stay away from the creek. When the snow was melting, the creek became a dangerous swift moving river. I was afraid of the creek; I had a deep weird feeling that something bad was going to happen. I would keep some distance away, but would catch myself being strangely drawn to it as I staring deep in the crystal-clear water.

It was early spring and I was laying in the yard looking up at Pikes Peak and listing to the roar from the swollen creek. In my mind I could see a little boy swimming very fast down the swift moving creek. It’s like a movie in my head the scene would last several seconds then I would sit up for a few moments and when I lay back down the picture in my mind would repeat it’s self. I ran in the house and exclaimed to Mother, I just had a dream with my eyes open.

Mother picked me up, hugged and kissed me then dismissed it by saying, Oh son you must have been sleeping in the grass again.

I went back out to play, but could not understand what caused that image to flash through my mind. Like most small children my age it was soon forgotten and I went back to playing. Less than a week later I had the same dream with my eyes open again, this time it was more vivid. It looked like the little boy was swimming very fast, his mouth open wide as if calling for help and his arms were moving rapidly up and down. I did not tell Mother about this vision since she did not believe me the first time, but this one really bothered me and stayed on my mind the rest of the day.

There was a neighbor boy the same age as John. They looked so much alike they could pass as twins. Even their names were similar his name was Johnny. To tell little rowdy boys like John and Johnny not to go near a creek was an open invitation for them to check it out.

Come on let have a look at the creek. Johnny said.

After the visions, I was scared to go near the creek so I stayed a little ways behind them. It was swollen with snowmelt and was roaring loudly and moving really fast. John and Johnny eased up close to the edge of the bank and peeked over. I was stretching my neck to see what they were looking at from my safe distance. There were small trees and branches that the creek had torn loose from the banks and they were swiftly moving downstream. As Johnny took a step closer to the edge to get a better look the bank gave way and he slid down the bank into the roaring river. John ran back to where I was and we started screaming for help and running along the riverbank. The water was quickly taking Johnny down-stream. We watched him go under and come up flapping his arms trying to swim. His attempt at swimming was no help at all; the river sucked him under and he disappeared.

Everybody had poured out of the houses as soon as they heard our cry for help. Soon the yards were full of cars bringing volunteers to look for Johnny. People searched all night with flashlight and lanterns, but came back in the early morning empty handed. Mrs. Blakely, Johnny’s mother was having a hard time accepting the fact that Johnny had drowned and she kept repeating, He just can be gone. He just can be gone. She was in such a state they finally had to take her to the hospital.

Eventually, Johnny’s body was found a half mile downstream. John and I had a hard time accepting his death; he was a good playmate and we had helplessly watched him drown.

Johnny was an only child and his mother was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. From her hospital bed, she kept saying that John and I were responsible because we had taken him to the creek. In fact, Johnny was the one that suggested we go to the creek. We told the story like it was but Johnny’s mother would not believe us. When she kept accusing us for being the instigators Mother finally had enough and they had some words about it. Our family and Johnny’s family never spoke again.

The drowning was exactly like the visions I had when laying in the yard. This coincidence really bothered me; this was the first hint in my mind that I was different from other boys.

Besides the drowning tragedy, the most memorable thing that I remember about Colorado was on a warm spring day when we kids decided to walk down the road to meet Dad returning from work, which we did from time to time. We walked down a good quarter mile and around a curve, Bill was leading me by one hand and JoAnne the other. I looked up on a cliff directly above us and pointed.

Look! See the pretty kitty, I said. It looked like a large kitty cat to me, but it was large Cougar. Bill and JoAnne dragged me all the way back home. That ended our road trips to meet Dad.

A couple of our neighbors were two old maid sisters. They had never had any kids and they thought I was the cutest they had ever seen. One day they made me a tall hat out of a grocery sack and I would parade around in it and act a fool just to get them to laugh at me. They were always mothering me and I took advantage of this and would con them out of candy. However, when they started dressing me in little girl’s clothes I decided that I could do with out the candy. If they were sitting out in the yard I would still go visit them to try and get some candy, but would run like the devil back home if they suggested that I come in there house with them. They liked to tease me by holding up a stick of candy to get me to come over to their house and then begging me to come inside their house with them. They did that just to see the frightened expression on my face as I ran home.

Like most Irish men Dad liked to hit the pubs. There were plenty of them built around the construction of the military base. Many a time we had to get him out of a bar. Mother never said anything about his drinking. He was a hard working, good provider and had a big weight on his shoulders with four children to raise in those rough times.

We were in Colorado for another year. John started school; JoAnne was in the third grade and Bill the fifth. I was now alone a lot during the day. I loved to play in the yard and no one had to remind me not to go near the creek I was still terrified of it even during the season when it was just a small stream. I now had a toy tractor to play with and still enjoyed lying on my back in the grass looking at the snow on top of Pikes Peak. I began to enjoy being by myself and observing everything around me. This was my first step to being an introvert.

When the base was near being finished Dad was out of work. We took another cross-country move back to Missouri. The return trip we had a little money and could afford to stay in cheap motels along the highway. It was my first time in a motel and I loved it. Everyday I looked forward to when it would start getting dark and we would begin looking for a motel to spend the night in. This was many years before television but we had a battery radio to listen too.

We settled about six miles out from Qulin, Missouri, a small farm town with a population of less than five hundred, located in Southeast Missouri, sixty miles south of where I was born. There is an old story about a man who was passing through and asked a local citizen what the population of Qulin was. He answered, Two stories, two whores and a beer joint. Of course, he was wrong. There were in fact, three beers joints and for its sizes it was a rough and tough little town. The nearest law enforcement was in Poplar Bluff, fifteen miles away.

There were several small farm towns like Qulin near by. However, Qulin with the three beer joints was the place to be on Saturday night. When men from the other local towns came to Qulin, the beer joints would be hopping and of course, when everybody got full of beer the fights would start.

We moved onto a forty-acre farm, as sharecroppers. An old man that everyone called, The old Dutchman, owned the property. We were to live there rent-free and receive a third of the profits for cultivating the twenty cleared acres. Our house was a four-room wooden structure, with a tin roof, but no siding or insulation. It had no running water, no electricity and as always the outhouse was in the backyard. There was a barn with a fenced in lot, twenty acres of tillable land and twenty in pasture that had grown up in brush.

All we kids slept in one room, us three boys in one bed and JoAnne in another. It was a large room, but again there was no furniture apart from the two beds. For light, we had two kerosene lamps and for entertainment, there was the battery radio. Our only winter heat was from a wood stove in the living room. To keep cool in summer there were screen doors that allowed the wooden doors to stay open to let the air circulate and cardboard church fans we could fan ourselves with.

I loved it when it was a rainy and stormy night. Under a warm quilt in the cold bedroom, listing to the rain on the tin roof and the clash of thunder was better than a sleeping pill. I can still remember the cozy feeling that the rain and thunder gave me and the warmth from the quilt that Mother had made.

On our first day after getting settled in our house Dad decided to introduce himself to the nearest neighbor. Our house was on a dirt road about a half mile off a gravel road. The nearest neighbor lived up a private dirt lane across the road from our house. I decided to tag along with Dad. When we came up to the house Dad knocked and when the door opened, a blast of foul smelling air hit me in the face. I looked up at Dad and exclaimed in a loud voice, P- E- U Daddy it stinks in here! Amazingly, my remark didn’t seem to offend anyone. They invited us in and introduced themselves. They were the Martins. There were eight children, a handicapped father and overworked mother.

Their house, a large one-room log cabin, consisted of a small kitchen, large overstuffed couch and the rest of the house was taken up in beds. The children slept four to a bed, and the children’s beds smelled of stale urine. The oldest son Dick was in his twenties and had moved out a few years before. Betty was Bill’s age, the next two boys, James and Henry were John’s age, a girl named Dell May was my age and then there were two little girls and a baby boy. Their yard had no grass, just dirt from so many kids playing in the small space. There was only one tree with an old worn-out easy chair under it where the father sat most of the hot summer days. There is an old saying. No matter how poor you think you are you can always find someone that is worse off. For us, it was the Martins, but they were good neighbors.

On the farms, even in the farm towns, everyone worked and that included me. Most jobs were harvesting the farm crops. My job was to pump water for our two mules, two horses, a cow and a calf. The pump was taller than I was. I had to raise the handle as high as I could reach over my head and pull down with both arms as hard as my weight would let me. I pumped the water into a large hollowed out Cyprus log. It looked huge to a five year old, but it only held twenty gallon. Before I could get it full, some of the stock would come up and drink it dry, sometimes I would throw dirt clods at them, to scare them away, until I could get it completely full.

Back then a sharecropper’s life was extremely hard especially on women. All meals had to be made from scratch and Mother had to can or preserve everything possible from the garden. Pork was smoke cured at home. Twice a day the cow had to be milked then the milk strained and the butter churned. The only way to keep milk cool was to sit it inside an insulated wooden box under the pump and pump cool water onto the box.

Lye soap was made by boiling pork fat for several hours in a big black kettle outside. On wash day Mother scrubbed clothes for all six of us on a scrub board. Many times, I sat and watched her scrub the rough cloth of overalls for the four males in the family. The washing would take from daylight to dark. It consists of, heating water in a big black kettle in the yard, scrubbing clothes then pinning them on a line to dry.

From early spring until late fall Mother helped in the cotton fields. Spring was for chopping the grass out of cotton and planting a garden. The fall was for canning vegetables, picking cotton, plus the day-by-day work of taking care of the family. During the winter Mother made sure us kids had clean clothes to wear; would pack our lunches for school and always had a shoulder for us to cry on. Her workday started before daybreak and did not end until after dark. When she did have free time to listen to the radio, she was busy sewing clothes or making quilts while listing to her favored programs. I can remember many Saturday nights listing to the Grand Old Opera on the radio and Mother sewing and singing along with the artist.

I started having dreams about rattlesnakes. This was not a dream with my eyes open, it was a regular sleeping dream and it was scary. I dreamed that I was out in the cotton field and fell in a hole that was full of rattlesnakes. I kept trying to climb the wall to get out but kept sliding right back within a few feet of the nest of rattlers. It seemed to take me forever to get back to the wall and try climbing again. About the time that the first rattlers got in striking distance, I would wake up. I could not understand the dream I was never scarred of snakes but I did highly respected them and I knew how to tell a poisonous snake from a non-poison one.

One Sunday in spring we had taken off work and drove to town to visit some relatives. The cornfields had begun to tassel and new green ears of corn began to mature. While we were gone, our cow got into the cornfield. Cattle in a green cornfield will eat themselves to death if not stopped. Our cow had eaten so much green corn that it had fermented in her stomach and caused a build up of gas and her stomach was about to burst. The next morning after we got home from our trip, Dad saw that the cow was sick and drove to town to call a veterinarian. When the veterinarian arrived, he and my grandfather worked all day trying everything to relieve the cow’s gas but to no avail. I watched her die.

After the cow died I went in the house. Mother was sitting on her bed crying. It was not only the loss of the animal, but we would have no milk or butter until the calf was grown or we would have to try and scrape up enough money to buy another cow. This was going to cause the family a lot of hardship and was onetime the neighbors let us down. They saw the cow in the corn and could have put her in our barn before she had eaten enough to kill herself

The Sunday that the cow got in the cornfield, we had visited one of my uncles who loved to tease me. He and another uncle would make my life miserable. They would say, Looks like a cow farted brand in your face, referring to my freckles. I would try throwing thing at them or doubling up my fist and trying to hit them but that just made them worse. Dad was as bad as his brothers about teasing. He never teased his own children but laughed along with his brothers when they teased me. My parents never knew how much that hurt me. This caused me to believe that I was ugly and dumb, and my self-esteem stayed at rock bottom. At an early age, I was extremely introverted because of this constant teasing. It got to the point that I hated to go when we went to visit them.

When the cow died, there was nothing else to do with her body but to drag it off into the woods or heavy brush and allow wild animals to dispose of it. John, a couple of neighbor boys and me found out where they had taken the dead cow so we walked there to see it. We found it among some brush and several possums were feeding on her. I made myself a promise never to eat possum meat again. We got to playing around a rotten log and discovered a nest of snake eggs. The eggs were hatching and they were baby rattlesnakes. We took sticks and played with them, not realizing how dangerous a newborn rattler could be. One of the older boys picked one up by the neck and we were able to pet it. I was always fascinated with snakes and enjoyed the opportunity to see one up close. It was not long until we heard Mother calling us and we had to run back to the house so she would not know where we had been. We were told to stay in the yard or barnyard when we were playing.

At one point all four of us kids came down with head lice, something we had never had before. Mother was embarrassed and made a special trip to town to get medication. She had no more than got rid of our lice when James and Henry Martini came down to play. They came in the house and Mother saw head lice crawling in their hair. Now she knew where our lice came from. She took the boys just as if they were her own, cut their hair short, and doctored them for the lice. She sent a note home with them telling their mother she needed to get the medication and doctor the rest of her children. She told her not to send the kids down to play until they were cured. Back then neighbors helped neighbors almost as if they were family.

I loved visiting my grandparents. They lived a couple miles away from us on the gravel road. Grandmother had one of the first gasoline powered washing machine which had a kick starter to get it going. The motor was the same as a power lawnmower. With this being the first power washer I had seen I was amazed at how it worked and the action of the wringer. The wringer had no power but had a large handle to turn to make the wringer work. I would beg grandmother to let me feed the clothes through the wringer, just to watch the water being squeezed out of them. They also had a large barn that I loved to play in. The barn was full of pigeons and I loved to watch them as they built nests and when they were feeding their young.

One clear, but windy day when I was out in their yard, a whirl wind (some call them dust devils) started. It kept growing and growing and when it crossed where my grandparents trash pile was, it picked up all the empty cans and took some so high they was just a small speck. I watch the cans going in a circle with amazement. It was not long until it had grown to be a huge windstorm and I began to get scared when it turned and headed for me. I jumped up and ran in the house. When it hit the house, it was a loud roar and took off some shingles and the screen door that I had just got in ahead of it. To this day, I have never seen a whirlwind that big. It is no surprise that the boot heel of Missouri is classified as tornado alley.

Dad had landed a job in Qulin at Dudley’s furniture and grocery stores. This was badly needed. We absolutely couldn’t make a living sharecropping the twenty acres of cleared land. We did not have much but was better off than any of our neighbors. While working in Colorado Dad had made enough money to trade our old truck in and buy a newer used one. We were the only family for miles around with an automobile. Because of World War II, all auto factories stopped making automobiles and were making military vehicles. Most everyone was back to team and wagon for transportation. A few had old tractors but most farmed their land with a team of horses; it was like being back in the early nineteenth century.

Dad changed his ways, quit drinking and joined the Southern Baptist Church. Mother had been a member for years and now every Sunday we would get in the truck and drive to a small wood frame Baptist Church. The preacher, Brother Paul was young, handsome and very poplar especially among the ladies. The church had a class on Sunday for little guys like me. This was my first introduction into the Southern Baptist faith. It was fun to go there where many kids were my age to play with.

Not long after we had moved to the farm Dad was breaking a pair of horses to pull a wagon and other farm equipment. Both were young horses which were broke to ride but they had never been broken to the harness. Dad had the harness on them and hooked to a wagon. They were rearing up but were only a little nervous until the neighbor’s dog started barking and nipped one of the horse’s hooves. This spooked both horses and they took off running as fast as they could. They got free of the wagon and were dragging Dad down the road. He was finally able to get loose from the guidelines and rolled into a ditch. We were lucky Dad was not hurt more than scratches and bruised. If he had been laid up and could not work then times would have gotten very hard for us.

The horses were found about three miles away dripping with sweat and so tired they were trembling. The two were never broke to the harness but they made good riding horses for us kids. We still had the two mules to cultivate the fields.

Kids are inquisitive and one day James and Henry Martin were in our barn playing. They pulled out their penises and were playing with them. When I walked in, they got my penis out and were playing with it. It felt good so I let them play for a while, but I knew they were not supposed to be doing that. In a little while they quit playing with me and said, Came with us we are going to watch Dell May go to the outhouse, I followed them to the outhouse and we peeked through the cracks in the boards. This was the first time that I had seen a girl naked. Dell May told on us and I got a good switching.

Dad and Bill had to cultivate the twenty cleared acres with a pair of mules and a single row plow. I would follow behind the plow and watch all the birds come in behind me and grab insects and worms that the plow had uncover. This was one of my fun things to do, I had already began to enjoy observe the many different kind of birds. Sometimes I would follow the plow so long that as soon as it got dark I would be completely tired out and ready to go to bed.

I did not mind the work in fact many of the farm jobs I liked to do. Picking cotton was one of them. This was cotton country and even the school’s schedule was planned around the cotton crop. School would start the last week in July or the first week of August. School would be in session for about six weeks then would close for cotton picking, depending on when the cotton was ready to harvest which was usually about the first or second week in September. This was called Cotton Vacation and lasted about six weeks. I never could figure it out why they called it a vacation when the time out of school was for working.

Fall came and I started my first year of school. The two-room schoolhouse was three and half miles from our house and we had to walk all the way. Qulin had some school busses and even though we lived only a half mile from where the busses passed, we were not allowed to ride. The bus service was for students that attended the town school. Four feeder two room rural schools were part of the Qulin school district.

Walking the long distance to school was no problem for us kids. We had several neighbor kids walking with us and we played or fought all the way. We had to bring our lunch as there was no lunch program in the rural schools and even if there was our family could not afford it. In all my short life the only playmates I had were the few neighbor children, now I have five boys my own age. I learned how to tease the first grade girls and what it means to have a girlfriend.

On the last day of school before cotton vacation Della May and me were the only ones going to school. Being the last day there was nothing really going on. Most all the older kids stayed home to pick cotton. We hated it because we were little and had to attend this last day by ourselves. We had walk most of the distance and was close enough we could see the schoolhouse when a small dog started barking at us. This dog was a long ways up a private dirt lane from the road. There was no way he would get any closer and we knew it. We were not afraid but decided this was a good excuse not to go to school. Therefore, we turned around and started the long walk home. When we got there, we told our mothers how a big dog almost bit us and he would not let us pass to go to school. I guess we were good con artist because they never questioned our little fib.

This was my first year in the cotton fields. Mother and all the rest of the family were picking cotton, I had to go to the field with Mother and play in the cotton middles. The cotton rows were planted about four feet apart and the space between the cotton rows was called Cotton Middles. I got bored the first day and begged Mother to make me a toe sack. (A toe sack was a gunnysack with a strap sewed on it that went over the left shoulder and under the right arm). This way one could pick cotton with both hands, transfer cotton from the left hand to the right and drop it in the sack. When you filled your sack, you carried it to the end of the patch and there would be a wagon and someone to weigh your cotton. After it was weighed and the amount was recorded under your name, you would climb up in the wagon and dump your cotton in it.

Big kids and adults had store bought cotton sacks that were seven feet, nine feet and a few were even twelve feet long. It was a big event when you got big enough to graduate from a toe sack to a seven-foot sack. It was an unspoken rule when you could fill a sack more than four times a day it was time to go to a longer sack. Mother made me the toe sack and I picked enough cotton at six years old to buy all my school clothes including a brand new pair of fancy shoes.

Picking cotton could be rough on the fingers; the open cotton boles had sharp points on them. It was advisable to wrap tape around the end of your fingers or wear gloves. If you did not protect your fingers, it took a couple weeks for the end of the fingers to get tough enough that they didn’t hurt.

When the cotton wagon got full, it was taken to Qulin and the cotton processed through the Boeving Brothers Cotton Gin. One Saturday during cotton harvest, John and I were allowed to ride on a load of cotton to Qulin. This was the most exciting thing to happen in my young life. It took a good hour for the small tractor to pull the load to town. On the way, we passed our grandfather’s house as he and grandmother were working in their garden, we yelled and waved. This was wonderful riding in the wagon and seeing everything along the way.

When we got to the cotton gin, there were many wagons ahead of us. A team of horses or mules pulled most of the wagons. The line of wagons stretched over a block, we ran back and forth along the wagon line looking at all the horses. That day John and I got a nickel apiece to spend for candy. We walked down a block to a small IGA store. It was a long wooden building with room for just one row of shelves down the middle. They had the biggest assortment of candy I had ever seen. It took me a long time to make up my mind as everything looked so good, the bars were a quarter pound and the small pieces of hard candy were a large sack for a nickel. John got tired waiting and told me to hurry up. I finally made up my mind on the large sack of hard candy. By the time we got back to the gin our wagon was next to be unloaded. When it was our time, the wagon was pulled under a large pipe that hung from the ceiling. A man got in the wagon and the cotton was sucked up the pipe, just like a huge vacuum cleaner, and carried into the building. The seeds were extracted from the cotton and blown into a small building called a seed house. Then the seedless cotton was compacted into bails and wheeled out to a platform to be hauled in trucks to a processing plant. We were allowed to go into the gin with Dad and watch the operation all the way through to the bails being compacted. What a great adventure.

Riding home in the empty wagon, I watch the farms along the way slowly slide by while eating my sack of candy. The old Dutchman’s house was the first house we passed about a half mile out of Qulin, he was in his yard working and John and I hollered at him and he gave us a big wave as we passed. Living in the country was great I loved it.

In the summer, the old Dutchman would come out everyday that it was not raining to work on clearing the twenty acres of pasture that had grown up in brush. John and I followed him everywhere and he would tease us about the neighbor girls. One day we sat with him while he was eating his dinner, he always brought a sack lunch. We were amazed at the bread he was eating. We had never seen bread that came from a grocery store. We were curious about this new kind of bread and would watch him while he was eating it. He thought we were hungry so he gave us one of his scrambled egg sandwiches. Wow! This sandwich was the best we had ever had. Our bread had always been homemade biscuits. Even in our school lunches were biscuits with bacon and biscuits with homemade jelly.

After that when he stopped for lunch we immediately quit whatever we were doing and would follow him to the shade tree where he ate his lunch. We would put on an act that we were hungry and it was not long before he started bringing us our own scrambled egg sandwiches. We thought this old man was the greatest.

A neighbor had given us a small brown dog. We named her Penny because she was the color of a copper penny. She weighed about four pounds. We had always had dogs except in Colorado. I was glad to have a little dog again; she would tag along with me when I was out in the yard playing. One morning Mother woke me and said go out to the outhouse and see what is out there. I jumped up and ran to the outhouse. There in a box my little dog Penny had given birth to four puppies, they were so cute I was jumping for joy. I got to play with the puppies until they were weaned, then I cried when dad gave three of them away.

Several weeks after Penny gave birth; Bill came in from rabbit hunting crying. He was fourteen now and I had never seen him cry. When he told us what happened everyone started crying. He had taken Penny with him to hunt. She loved hunting rabbits and would go into thickets or brush piles and run them out. She went into a brush pile and with her brown color, she looked like a rabbit and Bill shot her by mistake. It was a sad day when I watched Bill bury her. It took the family a long time to get over losing Penny, but we still had one of her pups.

I had a little kitten that someone had given me. I didn’t have it very long when one day it was sleeping in front of a wagon wheel and was run over. I saw it when it happened and ran over and picket it up. It clawed me bad before I could drop it. Being six years old at the time, I could not understand why the kitten scratched me as I was only trying to help it. I never cared much for cats after that, but dogs I always had one or two.

Most of the dogs we had when I was grown up were hunting dogs. Bill was the big hunter in our family.

Mother’s younger brother, Clyde and his wife, Brenda lived a couple miles down a one-lane dirt road behind our house. They both were extremely obese somewhere in the weight range of four hundred pounds. They lived on a small farm in a two-room shack. They had ten acres of cotton and did not have the money to pay labor to chop the grass out of it. If the grass was not cleaned out from around the cotton plant, it would choke the cotton plant out and there would be no harvest. Our family volunteered to help them chop the cotton out for free. It took three weekends of both Saturdays and Sundays to clean out their cotton field. Mother was a strict Baptist and we were not to work on Sunday, but she said that God would understand when it was for helping a brother.

A regular garden hoe was used to chop the weeds out of cotton and thin the cotton plants so they would not choke each other out. I was too young to chop cotton so I played in the cotton middles. This was boring to me so I started walking around to find something to do. It was hot so I sat down under a bush at the edge of the cotton field and started throwing clods of dirt at a piece of wood I was using for a target. Behind me I heard the clear and unmistakable rattle of a rattlesnake. I froze knowing by the sound that he was not far from me. My throwing clods had disturbed him. I was desperately trying to decide what to do, freeze and hope he would go away or take a chance and roll away from him. There was no way I could just get up; he would have me before I could get to my feet. He kept rattling and I knew I was too close to him and that he