Reflections: Glimpses of the Past

By James O. Jeffers

The book chronicles James Jeffers' life from about age two but it purposefully falls short of being either memoirs or autobiography. With this work he has attempted to simply record for his children, grandchildren, and others the wonderful events of his life as he experienced them. The book covers thousands of miles of travel along with living and working with peoples of differing cultures on three continents and in the Caribbean, five foreign countries, and fifteen different states spanning the nation from coast to coast to coast.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Jun 29, 2003
• ISBN: 9781466958227

James O. Jeffers

After retirement in January 2000 and almost fifty years of marriage, James finally succumbed to years of peer pressure to write this book about his life. He had a wonderful childhood growing up with two brothers and a sister, all younger, parents and grandparents on both sides and uncles and aunts and many cousins. Their side of the family probably was in the lower middle class but they didn't know it; deprivations were very few. James married soon after graduating from high school in 1953 as valedictorian of his class, then spent four years in the U. S. Navy's SeaBees. His working life then spanned two career fields; the first in positions of mid-management in the grain industry then, the last twenty-five years as a Resident Construction Manager and in administering project controls as a construction planner on heavy industrial construction projects.

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© Copyright 2003 James O. Jeffers. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Jeffers, James O., 1936-

Reflections : glimpses of the past / written by James O. Jeffers.

ISBN 978-1-4120-0389-6 (softcover)

ISBN 978-1-4669-5822-7 (ebook)

I. Title.

F419.H52J43 2003      920.71      C2003-902873-9

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This book was published on-demand in cooperation with Trafford Publishing.

On-demand publishing is a unique process and service of making a book available for retail sale to the public taking advantage of on-demand manufacturing and Internet marketing. On-demand publishing includes promotions, retail sales, manufacturing, order fulfilment, accounting and collecting royalties on behalf of the author.

Suite 6E, 2333 Government St., Victoria, B.C. V8T 4P4, CANADA

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Contents

Introduction

1938-40 ... My Earliest Memories

1941-46 ... My Early Years

1947-49 ... Mid-school years and my first job

1950-53 ... School, Scouting, and other Interests

1954-58 ... Matrimony, military service, and more

1959-62 ... Time to settle down

1963-66 ... The ARGCA or the U. S. Navy?

1967-69 ... Family losses, friends, and a turning point

1970-71 ... The Thrill of Flying ...and other things

1972-73 ... Guyana - A Real Change of Pace

1974-75 ... Sugartime, a la Cote d’Ivoire

The Sugartime Caricatures

1976-77... Algeria, a camel-crossing in the Sahara

1978-79 ... Iran, almost, then Ohio

1979-80... California, here we come

1981-82 ... Texas, Aruba, then back to Texas

1983-84 ... Indiana and New Energy

1985-97 ... East Tennessee, the Great Smoky Mountains & more...

1997-xx ... Retirement, Mountain Hiking, & ALCOA again...

After word

Epilogue

This book is dedicated to

Glenda

Introduction

This is merely a collection of memories; my memories which span almost my whole life. It is, then, pretty much the story of my life. For me, it has been a good life almost always and, again for me, it has been exciting enough, though I would expect few others to find it exciting or even very interesting. Therefore, my reason for taking the time and effort to make this record is simply that; to record for all time my memories of the past as I recall them today for the benefit of the few individuals who may someday wish to know.

Much has been written about memories and now I add a little more; my own interpretation, as it were. Actually, what I write here has probably already been written by someone or, if not written, probably it has been at least a figment of someone’s thought processes:

The memories revealed herein are mine and, although I may share hem with others, my memories probably differ from those of anyone else who may have shared participation in the same events. That should not, however, detract from the reader’s conception of the truth of the event being revealed or, to be more exact, the truth of the memory of the event being revealed. I believe that, in the case where more than one person remembers the same event, the multiple sets of memories would all be true and it could still be possible that neither set depict the remembered event exactly as the event really occurred when it occurred. Someone has said, in a song I think, memories are stronger than time and I believe that is true. One tends to remember events as one wants to remember them. And, as one ages and matures, I believe he tends to remember events a little differently from the way he may have remembered the same events at an earlier age. The memories, themselves, are true even though what they reveal may be skewed to some degree from the actuality of the remembered event. One should realize that a memory is not the same as a record. A memory is completely free to disagree with a record and exists only in the mind. The things I have written about, my Reflections, exist now not only as memories of mine, but as a record of those memories as well. Don’t be confused; I said a record of those memories, not a record of the events themselves.

JOJ

1938-40 ... My Earliest Memories

The earliest reflections I have must have occurred during the year 1938. I say that because there were events that happened that I remember and they happened, I have been told, when I was two years old. And I was two years old in February, 1938.

My brother, Gaylon, was born in March of that year. I don’t remember Gaylon’s birth, but other things happened, probably later in the year, that I do remember. I got really sick that year; I was told, I think, that my illness came in the Summer, which would have been a few months after Gaylon was born. I had something called colitis and I’ve been told that I almost died. Dr. R. L. Hickman was the attending physician and he gave Mom and Dad the only hope that he, himself, had left. He was willing, he told Mom and Dad, to perform a (then) illegal transfusion that he thought might bring me around. They gave their permission, of course. They begged him to try, and he did. And it worked! To this day I carry a scar, which is more like a small brown birth-mark, inside my left elbow which was caused by the transfusion needle. Dr. Hickman, himself, has told me this on more than one occasion.

The events that I remember occurred after my illness. I can remember being in the back yard and not being strong enough to open the screen-door to get back into the house. I remember standing on the step and calling my Grandma to come and open the door for me. Nanny, come let Ninny in. And I remember Granddad’s old rooster, whose name was Cook. Old Cook lived in the back yard and he was mean. He was part game-cock and, for some reason, he didn’t like me. The feeling was mutual. I didn’t like him, either. I was scared of him, too. He would chase me around the yard and usually hem me into a corner. I can remember that! I remember throwing tin-cans, rocks, or whatever I could put my hands on to hold him at bay while I called someone for help. And I remember one other thing from that summer. I had an imaginary friend who I called Vito. I don’t have a clue as to where that name came from but, in a way Vito was real. At least, he was real to me. Vito was never there unless the removable push-handle was removed from the baby stroller that we had. When the handle was removed, Vito was in residence. If I held onto him and helped him a little, Vito could walk around the house with me and, occasionally, I would even take him out into the back yard. I don’t remember old Cook ever bothering me when my friend Vito was with me so Vito was also my protector, I guess. I can’t remember ever learning anything from Vito. Don’t know if he talked or not. But he sure listened a lot and I certainly told him everything I knew.

I do remember another incident which occurred either that year or the next. I know it occurred in the same general time-period because it occurred while we lived in the same house as during the events just discussed above. I don’t know the house number or even the name of the street, but I could go back to that house right now if it still exists. It was known as The Call House probably because it was owned by Mr. Ellis Call.

I know the house was owned by Mr. Call later, so maybe it was ‘later’ that the house was considered The Call House. Anyway, the incident: I remember that Dad brought home a young billy goat in a gunny-sack (a burlap bag). He took the goat out of the sack and tied him to a tree in the side-yard. Dad got the goat from Mr. Hydrick (the father of George Hydrick who, many years later, would work for me at the Hickory Ridge Grain Dryer).

At that time, Dad worked with Mr. Hydrick and his boys, whose business it was to dig water wells. I know that Mr. Hydrick had several sons; they were A. D., Nick, George, and Jack, but there may have been others that I have forgotten. I think Jack was still in high school after I started to school because I remember him there. Anyway, I remember Dad bringing that goat home and I remember trying to pet the little fella after he was tied to that tree in the yard. I guess he didn’t want to be petted, though. He tried to butt me and he chased me round and round that tree until the rope pulled him up short. Of course, I could pet him all I wanted then, after he ran around that tree enough times to wind up his rope. I figure he must have been some kin to that damn rooster, Cook. I didn’t know it at the time, but that goat was not to be with us very long. I think Dad had him figured for the cook-pot when he bought him home, and that is exactly what happened to him.

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1941-46 ... My Early Years

There are a few significant events that occurred in 1941 that are embedded memories. One was the death of my paternal grandfather, Andrew Scott Jeffers. I vaguely remember him as a tall, slim man with a head of white hair; and he died this year. Granddad Jeffers was a farmer and a Justice of the Peace and, in later years, I met people whose marriage had been conducted by my Granddad Jeffers. We kids always spoke of Granddad Jeffers as Granddad Jeffers and of Granddad Day as just Granddad. Don’t know why that was unless it might have been because we were around Granddad Day almost all the time and we only got to visit Granddad Jeffers occasionally. It just seemed natural to do so. I have never heard anyone speak ill of my Granddad Jeffers or of Granddad Day, either, for that matter; and I certainly would not have stood for it if I had. The only shadowy mark of any kind that I know of against Granddad Jeffers was that he liked to take a little nip once in a while. But, what the heck, so do I and so did my Dad and my Granddad Day, so I don’t count that at all.

And Uncle George died that year, too, in April. He was Uncle George Meeks, the husband of Aunt Otie. Aunt Otie was my Granddad’s sister and I remember her very well. I’m sure I don’t remember that it was in April when Uncle George died, but my family records indicate that his death occurred on April 27th. I have only vague memories of Uncle George but I remember his death and I can remember being told that he was blinded in one eye in the same sawmill boiler explosion that had killed my Grandma’s father, Emory Allen, my great-grandfather, in 1919.

Another memory is of the loss of a dear play-mate; Cleta Louise Gann. She and I were the same age and, since our parents were good friends and visited together frequently, Cleta and I had played together since when I can’t remember when. Suddenly, at least for me, that year, Cleta’s family moved away to California. Cleta and I would correspond for the next dozen years or so, occasionally including photos, and we would see each other twice more; once in 1947 and again in 1953.

And another memory that I recall vividly is of the first and only spanking I ever got from my Granddad, Ernest Edward Tuck Day.

He spanked me with a razor strop for ‘running away from home’. I ran away from Grandma’s house and went to ‘town’ which was the town of Hickory Ridge and was about a quarter of a mile away. I was five years old at the time. I remember going into Mr. Emmett Smith’s store where I bought a bar of candy and, I guess, charged it to my Dad’s or Granddad’s account. I am sure I had no money so I must have charged the purchase. Just as I came out of Mr. Smith’s store, Granddad caught up with me and took me back home to Grandma. There he gave me the only spanking that I ever received from him. And it must have worked because I never ran away again.

1941 was also the year I started school. There was no ‘kinder garden’ or ‘head-start’ or anything of that sort back then. At least, not at Hickory Ridge. Back then, when one became old enough, usually at age 6, one just ‘started school’. So, in September, I started school. I was only five years old and would not be six, the legal age for starting school, until February of the following year but everyone seemed to think that I was supposed to start anyway. The feeling seemed to be that if there were an error, it was probably that my birthday should have been earlier. All the kids that I had grown with and played with were six years old and starting school so I should start school, too. In fact I did, and everything worked out just fine.

I started in the First Grade with about forty (40) other students under the tutelage of Mrs. Ernestine Campbell and, in 1953, graduated from the Hickory Ridge High School in a class of seven (7), four (4) of which were in that same class that started together in 1941. I never had any problems keeping up with my peers either then or later. Contrarily, from the very beginning, on any test, I usually made a higher score than most of the others in my class. I did not always have the highest score, but I tried. Johnny Harold Wilson made it hard for me to be first. He made me work for it and, he got the highest score about half of the time. When we graduated, I was Valedictorian and Johnny was Salutatorian. My GPA was only about a quarter of a point higher than Johnny’s. The sad thing is that our scores were not really very high. They were just high enough to be the best in the class. I am sure that neither Johnny nor I did the best that we could have done; just as I know that neither of us had to work very hard to make good grades.

Those were good times, my school years. I know they were hard times for Mom and Dad but they never complained. I like to believe, and I am sure I am right in believing that Mom and Dad enjoyed those times, too. Eventually there were six of us for which Dad had to provide. Besides Mom and Dad, there was me (born in February, 1936), Gaylon Milton (born in March, 1938), Sherron Lee (born in July, 1942), and Myrna Ruth (born in March, 1946). Dad never made much money but we never seemed to need much more than what we had. Dad worked hard to provide the things we needed and Mom worked hard to keep us all fed and clothed. We never went hungry and we always had warm, sturdy shelter and adequate clothing. Mom mended our clothing and we wore it until either we wore it out or we outgrew it, after which it was ‘handed down’ to a younger, smaller child. But we never wore rags and we never wore patched clothing in public although we did occasionally wear ‘patches’ to play or work around home. We grew together as a family and we were, each of us, responsible in some way for making it work so well. We all had daily chores and we all did our share. There was never much complaining around our house. If someone did complain, it usually meant that he or she was sick and had a reason for complaining.

Ours was a very close family. We were close to each other and with our grand-parents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. Going through a day without seeing Grandma and Granddad was as disconcerting as going through a day without seeing Mom or Dad or my brothers or sister. Of course, we spent all holidays together, usually at our house and with Grandma and Granddad staying ‘all night’, which was our phrase for ‘staying over’ and could mean from one to as many nights as we could prevail upon them to stay. We loved to have Grandma and Granddad come to our house and spend the night. I remember our holidays as being filled with love and laughter and warm togetherness. And going to stay all night with Grandma and Granddad was a big thing for us, too. All of us! I can remember going to Grandma’s and sleeping ‘tween on cold winter nights. That meant, of course, sleeping between Grandma and Granddad in Grandma’s big old feather bed. Grandma had a huge mattress stuffed with goose down that must have been at least a foot thick and sleeping between her and Granddad on top of that feather bed, between linen sheets and covered with big thick handmade quilts was just about the warmest place I could imagine.

At that time my Grandma and Granddad lived in an old house located on the Evans property in the South end of Hickory Ridge. The back yard butted right up against the Cotton Belt Railroad right-of-way and the front yard was against the old state highway 39 right-of-way. They lived there for many years, from as early as I can remember up until the mid-1940’s. The front yard was never very interesting because there was never much traffic on old highway 39 back then, but the back yard was a different story. The Cotton Belt Railroad carried an awful lot of freight both, north and south, so there were freight trains passing all the time. There was a passing siding along that stretch of railroad, too, so there would often be two trains to watch at the same time.

I can remember watching the men build up the railroad bed when they extended the length of that passing sidetrack. I watched from my Grandma’s back yard. It was interesting to a small boy and I am extremely glad, today, that I watched because I saw them using tools that one can hardly imagine today. They used ‘slips’ sort of like we use cats and pans today on large earth-moving jobs but their ‘slips’ had plow handles attached and they were towed by a team of mules. The team would tow the slip down into the borrow ditch where the driver would tip it forward slightly and pick up a load of dirt. Then the team would drag the slip up onto the roadway bed where the driver would trip the slip, dumping the dirt onto the roadway. Then they would go back to the borrow ditch for another load.

That was during the war years, too, World War II, so there were a lot of troop trains going in both directions past Grandma’s house. We delighted in watching for the troop trains and while they passed we would stand at the back fence gate and yell and wave at the soldiers on the trains. The soldiers always yelled and waved back. The ‘we’ in this case was Donald Lynn Evans and me, and sometimes Elizabeth Ann Coleman whose Grandma was Aunt Julie Greenwood and Aunt Julie’s house was just across highway 39 from my Grandma’s. Everyone called Elizabeth Ann Sisser and even years later she was still known as Sisser Coleman.

Because of that railroad sidetrack and because of the heavy traffic on the railroad, it seemed that there was almost always a train on the siding if there was one on the main line. It was the height of our day for a troop train to have to take the siding there and stop for another train to pass. Sometimes, when that happened, some of the soldiers would get off the train to stretch their legs and they would talk to us and usually give us candy bars and packs of Spearmint or Juicy Fruit chewing gum. Even when the troop trains didn’t stop, the soldiers would sometimes toss out candy bars and chewing gum to us and wave and yell as if they knew us personally. I never thought about it then, of course, but I guess they did that for kids in every little town they passed through. Those guys were something else! They were going off to fight a war thousands of miles from their homes so kids like Don and Sisser and me could go on being kids growing up in a nation free, not having to worry about anything except just being kids.

Those old steam engines were marvelous machines for us kids. Actually, I think the grown-ups loved them, too. Spending so much time near the railroad, we soon learned the difference between the different sized engines just by the sound of its steam whistle. We could tell if the train coming down the track was being pulled by a big old ‘800’ engine or a smaller ‘500’ or something else. During my early years, all of the engines were still steam powered on the Cotton Belt. Sometime later, although not too much later, the big diesel-electrics began to come into use. They were marvels, too, because they were new and different, but it was not many years before we began to miss hearing those old steam whistles blow. Us kids got to know the meaning of all those whistle signals as well as the train crews and when we would hear an engineer sounding a strange signal, we knew that something unexpected was happening. You could hear those old mournful sounding steam whistles from miles away on a quiet night.

I can remember another kind of traffic along that railroad, too. There were a lot of hobos traveling the nations railroads back then and there certainly were a lot of them going up and down the Cotton Belt Railroad. The nation was just beginning to recover from the economic crash of the 30’s and war was raging in Europe and in the Pacific. Shortly there would be more jobs than people to fill them but, right then, there were still a lot of people without work but with a need to travel. Many of them did not have the means to travel, though, so they ‘rode the rails’. They hopped freight trains and rode wherever they could, sometimes inside box cars if they were lucky, other times just ‘hanging on’. I have seen them perched on the couplings and even on the brake rods that run beneath the cars. Many of them, of course, lost their lives by falling beneath the wheels of the trains. The hobos would usually get off the trains when the trains stopped because the railroad ‘bulls’ (policemen) would throw them off if they could catch them.

When the trains stopped, if there were any houses nearby, the hobos would go to the houses and beg for food. Sometimes they would offer to chop firewood or do other odd jobs in exchange for a meal. And my Grandma always fed those that came to her door. She never turned anyone away. Usually she did not have any work for them to do, but she always had something that she could give them to eat. I can remember hobos coming to her back gate and asking for something to eat. She would always tell them to come into the yard and sit down by the back door and there she would bring them a plate of food. And an awful lot of them came to her door. It was almost as if they knew they could get something to eat at my Grandma’s house. I don’t know but maybe they did tell each other that there was a certain house in Hickory Ridge where they could always get a meal.

Now, my Mom was always a great cook and she must have learned it from my Grandma because my Grandma could make a grand meal out of almost anything. She was some kind of cook! She didn’t do any fancy cooking, just simple things. Aw, she could make the greatest pies and cakes and cookies, but that was about as fancy as it got. But she could cook up a pot of little navy beans and throw in a bunch of homemade egg noodles and serve that up with a bowl of wilted lettuce along with some sliced tomatoes, green onions, scratch biscuits and real butter and you would think you had a feast. It was a feast! A favorite Sunday dinner, what we call ‘lunch’ today, would be chicken and dumplings and all the trimmings. That is still a favorite today and we still try to make it taste as good as Grandma’s, but I was always partial to egg-noodles over dumplings and I still am today. You know how our parents used to insist that we kids eat our vegetables, especially spinach? Well, my Mom and Grandma, both, always insisted that we eat our spinach only my Grandma fixed it different. I didn’t like it any better, but I ate it any way ‘cause it would make me strong. My Grandma said so! She would mix up scrambled eggs in her spinach and to get the eggs, you had to eat the spinach. I hated it! But I ate it anyway. But, you know what? I would give anything for a plate of scrambled eggs and spinach right now. I like spinach now, but I didn’t like it then.

My Grandma and Granddad never had very much, not material things anyway, but they were always ready to share whatever they had. They never owned their own house but that little house by the railroad tracks where my Grandma and Granddad lived was as good as a castle as far as I was concerned. My Granddad had a job back then with Franklin Roosevelt’s WPA. I can remember him working on a gravel truck, where he was part of a crew of men who loaded the dump truck with gravel by hand, with shovels. The truck would then take the gravel and dump it onto a roadway where the crew would spread the gravel, again by hand. Granddad told me one time that his loading/unloading crew consisted of six men besides the truck driver and that he and his crew could, and many times did, load that truck in six minutes flat, shoveling virgin gravel from a bank. Now those old dump trucks were pretty small by today’s standards and they probably held only three or four yards of gravel at best, but that was still an awful lot of shoveling. But it was a job and, at the time, there were not many of those. To help out, my Grandma sometimes took in washing and/or ironing for folks that could pay for it. And Grandma and Granddad always had a big vegetable garden, same as we did.

My Granddad later worked at the school lunchroom. He was still working for the WPA, but that outfit had something to do with the school lunch programs back then, and I can remember him working there during my first year or two in school. His two sisters also worked at the lunchroom. His sister, Ina Evans, who was Don’s Grandma, was actually in charge, I think, and Granddad and another sister, Otie Meeks. I always knew the ladies as Aunt Inie and Aunt Otie. Aunt Otie lived with my Grandma and Granddad for many years after her husband, George, died in 1941. I can just barely remember Uncle George, just the fact that he was. But I remember that he was blind in one eye, the result of a sawmill boiler explosion that occurred in 1919 and also took the life of my Grandma’s daddy, my great-grandfather Emory Allen.

In the winter my Granddad ran a trap-line. He trapped fur-bearing animals and sold the skins to help make ends meet. Of course, it was something he enjoyed doing, too. I can remember him being gone all day long to run his trap-line and reset the traps. Then he might work into the night skinning the animals and stretching their pelts for drying. More often though, especially with mink, he would wait for daylight to do the skinning because he did not want to damage the skins. He did not bother with rabbits, except as table fare, because their skins were not worth much and he did not like to fool with muskrat. If he caught any muskrat, he would bring them in and usually sell them intact to let someone else worry with skinning them. He did not like skinning muskrat. Sometimes he would come in loaded down with all the raccoons, possums, and mink that he could carry. Mink skins brought the best money, up to about $50 each at one time for a really exceptional one. Most of them would bring him from $25 to $40 each and the raccoon skins were, I think, somewhere in the $5 to $10 range. Possum skins were at the low end of the scale but still dear enough to fool with, and he caught a lot of them. Granddad usually made out pretty good in the winter with his trap-line.

I can remember a time when we lived on what was called the ‘Margaret Watts farm’. Miss Margaret, as everyone called her, lived in town but she owned a small farm about 2-1/2 miles southwest of Hickory Ridge. I later learned that we had lived in rented rooms in Miss Margaret’s town house at some time when I was very small; probably before I was two years old. Miss Margaret was a widow, I believe, but she was also the sister of Pete Imboden, Sr., and that meant that her farm would be operated by an Imboden. In fact, it was operated by Pete Imboden, Jr., who was my father’s employer.

The year was still 1941, my first school-year. During the school term, I stayed in town with Grandma and Granddad through the week and went to school and Mom and Dad would take me home on weekends. We did a lot of walking back then because, much of the time, we didn’t have a car. I can remember us walking to and from town as a family, and Gaylon complaining that the rocks (road gravel) ‘hurt his belly’. At that, Dad would promptly pick Gaylon up and carry him the rest of the way. That was a pretty good walk for a 3-or-4 year-old. Gaylon would usually make it about half way before his belly started to hurt.

Sometimes we would ride to town with Mr. Kibler. Mr. Raleigh Kibler was the Hickory Ridge representative for the Arkansas Rice Growers. It might not have been called the Arkansas Rice Growers back then, but whoever it was, Mr Kibler worked for them and ran the rice storage warehouse at Hickory Ridge. He lived in town but, I believe he also owned a small farm which was located farther out, beyond Miss Margaret’s place where we lived because he would pass our house almost every day in that big old car of his, and many was the time that he gave us rides to town or back home from town.

We lived on Miss Margaret’s farm when Dad bought the first car that I remember us owning. I remember it as being a Model-A Ford, probably from about 1929 or 1930. It was a two-door sedan and what I remember most vividly is an instance when the car would not crank, as seemed to happen more often than not.

One time when were leaving Grandma’s to go home, the car took a contrary spell and refused to crank. So Dad set the throttle and the spark and put Mom in the driver’s seat to handle the controls while he pushed the car to get it started. When he had enough speed going, he yelled for Mom to release the clutch. She did and the engine started right away! Now, you got to understand that my Mom couldn’t drive. She had never learned to drive and Dad knew that. But he figured he could tell her what to do when the engine started and she would be able to stop the car under control. Are you beginning to get the picture? Huh? I want to tell you! When that old 4-cylinder started, the race was on. Mom had that car all over the road. If she had held it straight down the road, I don’t think Dad would have had a chance to catch her at all. Dad was running and trying to jump onto the running-board and he was yelling to Mom, trying to tell her how to stop the car. But she couldn’t hear him ‘cause she was screaming too loud. It sure was great fun for anyone who saw the incident. Even Dad thought it was funny after it was all over and he had time to catch his breath. I don’t think Mom ever did see the fun of it, though.

The next year (1942) found us living in a different location. Dad still worked for Pete Imboden, Jr., but Pete had built a new house for us on his farm a mile south of Hickory Ridge, and located almost on the bank of the ‘drudge’ ditch that ran south along side of the Cotton Belt railroad. We were living there in the Summer of 1942 when Sherron Lee was born. Mom needed some help during that time, so it was arranged that one of the Puckett girls, who lived with her parents on the bank of Bayou DeView, would come to stay with us and help Mom with her house work during that time. I am sorry that I don’t remember the girl’s given name; just that she was a Puckett. Gaylon and I both liked her and I am sure that Mom and Dad did, too. She took care of my little brother and me and she helped Mom with the house work, especially when the time for Mom to give birth drew near.

I remember once, probably when Mom’s time was upon her, when Mom and Dad let the girl take Gaylon and me home with her for a few days. We stayed with the Pucketts in their cabin on the bank of Bayou DeView. Of course, I did not know that it was ‘Bayou DeView’ then; it was just ‘the bayou’. Of our stay with the Pucketts, I remember playing with the other Puckett kids on the banks of that old bayou and I believe we went fishing and we went swimming in their old swimming hole. It was a fun time for young boys. I remember the old cabin was lighted with coal-oil (kerosene) lamps and that we slept in the loft. At night, the older kids told ghost stories to us younger ones, stories made all the more ghoulish by the howling of wolves out in the woods that surrounded the cabin. At least, they told us it was wolves that we could hear and I believe to this day that I heard wolves howling in the night.

After a few days, when Gaylon and I were taken home, we were surprised to learn that we had a new baby brother. We learned that his name was Sherron Lee. Mom and Dad had wanted a little girl and had even picked out a name. They would have named her ‘Sharon’, but when the package turned out to be another boy, they decided to keep the phonetics of the name they had chosen and just changed the spelling. But Sherron Lee was just as welcome in our household as he would have been if he had been the girl baby for which Mom and Dad had hoped. They would try again some years later and, in that attempt, they would get the little girl we all wanted.

Meanwhile, during the time the Puckett girl had stayed with us, she had met a young man and had fallen in love. I don’t remember the man’s name, either, but I do remember that we all liked him, too. He would come to our house to see the girl and, I guess, he courted her there. He spent a lot of time at our place and Gaylon and I liked him because he almost always brought us something. He would bring candy in a sack and I remember that he once brought a jeep model for us. He even assembled the model of balsa wood and glue for us, painted it and put on all of the decals. It was a scale model of a U. S. Army jeep. This was during World War II, you know, and the jeep was a very popular vehicle.

I am sorry that I don’t know the man’s name and I don’t know how he came to be at Hickory Ridge. I do know that he was not a ‘local’. He arrived there from somewhere else and I think I remember hearing Mom and Dad say that he came to town with a traveling carnival. I also remember hearing Dad say that he seemed to talk a lot about the Army. Anyway, the man and the Puckett girl were married that summer (1942) in the living room of our house. Shortly after the marriage, they left and I think they went to Pine Bluff, although I am not sure. And shortly after that, investigators began coming around, looking for the man. The story I remember is that he was a deserter from the Army and that he was later caught in Pine Bluff. I don’t know what happened after that or what happened to either him or to his wife, the Puckett girl that we all liked so well.

Another little story which involved that model-A sedan that Dad owned and it happened while we were living in that house on the ‘drudge’ ditch: Now we kids, Gaylon and I, were not supposed to play in the car but one day we were ‘at’ the car and we had the car-door open. I know it was open because, in a little while, I had slammed the door shut on Gaylon’s thumb. It was an accident, of course. I would not have hurt him for anything but telling him that did not seem to make him feel any better at all. I kept telling him that over and over as he howled and kept yelling at me to open the door. The flange on the door had mashed his thumb and had him pinned. He couldn’t get away. Boy, when I opened that door and released him, he ran like a deer. I couldn’t catch him then. I chased him all the way to the house but only caught up to him when he got to Mom. She got his thumb all cleaned up and bandaged and got him quieted down. Somehow or other we did not get into trouble for being ‘at’ the car and I didn’t get in trouble for slamming the door on his thumb. But I sure washed and dried a bunch of dishes that afternoon, just in case. And Gaylon’s poor thumb had a funny little squeezed look for the rest of his life.

I can remember hearing my parents and grandparents talking about Uncle Russell getting married and although I don’t know exactly when that was, I think it was probably about 1940 or 1941.

Now Uncle Russell was really my Mother’s uncle. He was my Grandmother’s brother, but we always knew him as ‘Uncle Russell’. My Mother did not have any brothers or sisters and Uncle Russell was almost like an older brother to her. Aunt Villa was a widow when she and Uncle Russell began seeing each other and she had two daughters from her previous marriage to Arthur Kennedy. The girls names were Beverly Jean and Jimmie Lee and their daddy, Arthur Kennedy, had died in a shooting incident in or near Wynne, Arkansas, some years before. Uncle Russell and Aunt Villa later had two more children; a boy and a girl named Alvin Blaine and Rachel Sue, and all of us kids just sort of grew up together as cousins.

As we grew, we (the kids) also began to acquire other interests besides our family ties, but even so, our family ties never diminished. If anything, they probably grew stronger. We developed the usual ties with friends and relatives both, at school and at church.

I should mention that, back then, we were Methodists and we went to church regularly at the Hickory Ridge Methodist Church, whose Pastor was, at the time that I became a member, Reverend Porter Weaver. That is, Grandma and Mom and us kids went to church and Sunday school regularly. Dad and Granddad did not often go to church. It was not that they didn’t believe in church or God or anything like that. They did believe! Both of them had very strong religious beliefs and, at the drop of a hat, so to speak, they both could expound heartily and at great length upon their beliefs and, I might add, to the chagrin of anyone unlucky enough to get caught-up in an argument with either of them. Both of them read the Bible a lot and they remembered what they read. Sometimes they would argue for the longest times about something or other from the Bible. Both were usually right, of course, each one expounding on what he believed the meaning of this or that particular passage to be. But that is as it should be, is it not? Something that I see as black and white may not necessarily look black and white to you. I may see a glass of milk as partially full while you may see it as partially empty.

In later years, in the mid-1950s, Mom and Dad and all of the kids, except me, changed their church affiliation and became Baptists. When I returned home after being released from the U. S. Navy, I found that I was the only Methodist left and that my little brother, Sherron Lee, had felt the calling and had become an ordained Baptist minister, the youngest in the state at the time, in fact. Even later yet, I, too, changed and was baptized in the Baptist Church. But I am getting ahead of the chronological events here.

In 1943 or 1944, my Dad took a job with Mr. Reg Mahon and we moved from Hickory Ridge to Mr. Mahon’s farm near Swifton, Arkansas. Now, Mr. Mahon’s wife, Katherine, was my Granddad’s niece; she was the daughter of Aunt Inie and Uncle Dave Evans. Aunt Inie was my Granddad’s sister, and also the Grandmother of my closest buddy and ‘some kinda’ cousin, Don Evans. So, you see, we would still be close to family even though we would be several miles away from the place we called home.

On Mr. Mahon’s farm, we lived several miles out in the country, somewhere near the center of a triangle formed by the towns of Swifton, Cache, and Tuckerman. Gaylon and I had to walk about a mile and a half to the corner where we could catch the school bus, then walk back home from that corner in the afternoons. It was not a bad walk, though, and there were other kids that we walked with that had even farther to walk. The Patton kids and the Crain kids had to walk at least a mile farther, each way, than we did.

We lived on the farm near Swifton for less than two years but I remember it as a very tough place. I mean it was a hard farm. The soil was gumbo and a lot of the farm was new ground, recently cleared. That meant some very hard work for my Dad. Heck, just walking across gumbo after a rain shower is hard work. First, because it is very slippery and hard to stand up, then the gumbo sticks like glue to your shoes. Our feet would get so big, just a big ball of mud, that we could hardly walk. It is hard enough to make a decent levee in new ground with all the stumps and, if the soil is gumbo, forget it. I think my Dad hated that place if he ever hated anything. I know he hated gumbo and he never liked to work new ground.

My Dad never spanked us kids very often. Not that he didn’t correct us, he just left most of the spankings to Mom to administer. Usually just a word or a look from Dad was enough to set things right. I remember very well the last time my Dad spanked me. It was while we lived on that farm near Swifton. He got Gaylon, too, and probably would have gotten Sherron Lee if Mom had not been cuddling him and drying him off. All three of us boys were down at the barn with Dad. He was working, of course, and we were just messing around being boys. Dad had previously borrowed one of Mom’s number 3 wash tubs to use for mixing feed for our milk cow in the barn. When he finished mixing the feed, he called Gaylon and me over and told us to take Mom’s tub back to the house and hang it on its hook on the back porch.

Now, little brother, Sherron Lee, always tried to tag along with us. He was about three or four years old, I guess, and he tried to tag along with Gaylon and me everywhere we went. He had followed us to the barn that day and was still tagging along. On our way back to the house, we noticed the road ditch running bank-full of water and we decided that it would do Sherron Lee a world of good to take a boat ride. That number 3 tub would be the boat; get it? A number-3 wash