Unconventional Means: The Wars & Loves of John Wilson

By DeeJay Knowlton

Special thanks to the folks that supported me throughout the
creation of this book. I could not have gotten through it without
a lot of help. Patty Tidd, Johns special lady was a big supporter.
Thanks to Bob Shipley and Summer Foovay for your editing eyes.
Brent Martin and his family helped me decide on a title for the
book so they deserve thanks as well. Without the patience of my
dear husband, Gregg, I would never had been able to accomplish
a finished product. Thanks to everyone for your help.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 11, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462810550

Book preview

Copyright © 2011 by DeeJay Knowlton.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2010916601

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4535-7369-3

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4535-7368-6

                   Ebook                                 9781462810550

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Contents

PREFACE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

End Notes

PREFACE

John W. Wilson drew me in with his great smile, charismatic personality, and fascinating stories. Throughout his life, John, also known as Big John, BW, and Papa John, was an ordinary man with an extraordinary story. He came close to death many times in his life but slipped through by the skin of his teeth. One time, the military notified his family that he was dead, but he had actually been captured by the North Korean army. It makes me a strong believer in the saying that We all go when the time is right.

Every time I saw John, he had another interesting story to tell. Born one of a set of triplets, he was given up for adoption before his first birthday. With his new adoptive family, John was an adventurous, rebellious child who actually ran away with the circus when he was eleven years old. He learned to fly airplanes as a young man at the local airport just a few blocks from his home, and a plane rarely left the ground without John or one of the neighborhood kids on board.

I often told John that his stories were too good to lose, and he should be writing them down. One day he said to me, If you’ll write ’em, I’ll tell ’em. But . . . I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll tell you his story from the beginning as he told it to me during our many taping sessions. Sometimes as I tell his story, I will use his phraseology to keep his flair in the story. I accepted his challenge on June 15, 2006, when we sat down for the first time to start recording his stories. We continued taping stories for just over a year, meeting several times a month in two-hour sessions. This is the result of those efforts.

CHAPTER ONE

Early Childhood

The waters of the Gulf of Mexico were calm the morning of March 6, 1930, as a group of friends fished five miles out from Corpus Christi, Texas. Red Snapper were feeding on small fish and plants along a reef bank. Fishing was going well when cries of pain filled the air. A young mother on board, Juanita Whitehorse, and her Polish husband had taken the opportunity to go fishing with friends before their baby was born, and now her labor had begun. Due to their economic situation, she probably had not had any prenatal care and only speculated that she may be having twins. Her clues to this possibility were that twins ran on both sides of their families, and her belly had grown very large. As she went into labor, things moved along quickly, so there was no time to get to a hospital. Juanita was only thirteen years old, so she didn’t know much about childbirth, but luckily some of their friends on board knew a little about childbirth and were willing to help with the delivery. When the second baby was born, they were not surprised. It was quite a surprise when the third baby started to arrive, however. They named the firstborn John. Robert and Roberta arrived next, each about ten minutes apart. As the babies arrived into their world of poverty, hard work, and prejudice, the parents realized that this was going to be a life-changing event. They now had three babies to raise; it was quite an overwhelming feeling.

Their friends helped clean up the babies and the mess on the boat as they headed toward shore. After docking the boat, the new parents took the babies to Robstown, just south of Corpus Christi, to be checked out by the local pill pusher. There weren’t a lot of doctors around at that time, so they took what they could find. Mother and babies seemed to be doing fine and were released to go home. John was told they were crying as they were born and they were still crying when they got to the doctor’s office. So I guess they must have been healthy and hungry. There is no evidence that birth certificates were created or filed.

John’s mom and dad were migrant cotton field-workers, moving around the area as needed. They worked in the Robstown area for a while and then moved to Quanah, Texas. They used a horse-drawn farm wagon, which was a slow way to travel but affordable for their family. It had rained recently and the river waters were up, which slowed the traveling even more. As they crossed one river, the water came up to the bed of the wagon, which caused Juanita to get very anxious about the safety of her new babies. In the end all went well, and everyone was safe and dry as they arrived at their new home.

Settled into their new location Juanita walked back and forth to work, occasionally stopping by a service station along her route to purchase a soft drink. She would carry all three babies on her back as she walked and worked. It wasn’t easy making a living picking cotton while carrying three babies on her back. This made picking cotton almost impossible.

Woodrow Wilson (not the president) owned the service station where Juanita would stop on her way to and from work. He would engage her in conversation about the babies and ask her how she managed to pick cotton and carry them too. Stories about her troubles trying to do the job came tumbling out. It certainly was not an easy job for a young girl. Woodrow felt sorry for her as he also dreamed of having a baby of his own. He and his wife had been unable to conceive, and he thought it would be wonderful to have these three babies. Finally he worked up the courage to ask her if he could take her babies to rear as his own. He painted a picture of a comfortable existence for the babies in his happy home. He assured her that they would create paperwork to make it official and his buddies, who hung around the station, would be witnesses. Juanita said she would think about his proposition. That night Woodrow told his wife, Tempie, that he thought he might be able to get a baby for them, which seemed to please her. As Juanita considered the idea that night, she thought this might be a better situation for her babies and for herself, as she and her husband argued a lot. One night her husband got so angry that he picked up an iron, one of those that you heat up on a stove to iron clothing, and threw it at Juanita. He missed her but hit John on the arm as he lay on the bed. John’s father left Juanita that night and didn’t come back for weeks. With this bad situation in mind, Juanita, being very young, alone, and very poor, made the decision to give up her babies. Woodrow was very excited when she told him the news. He couldn’t wait to bring the babies home, although he had not told Tempie that there would be three babies. He and Juanita signed the adoption papers he had drawn up, and his buddies witnessed the transaction. Woodrow drove home with the babies in his old Buick Roadmaster. He brought all kinds of canned and bottled milk, diapers, and other baby-type things into the house. Then he brought one baby into the house. His wife, Tempie, was thrilled when she could actually hold the baby. They would finally be the family she had dreamed of. Then Woodrow said, I’ve got a big surprise for you,’’ and showed her the other two babies. Years later John’s aunt Jimmy Ruth told him that his new mother had said to Woodrow, It’s not like puppies, you know. You don’t have to take all of them just because they’re cute." They did keep the three babies together. Aunt Jimmy Ruth was John’s adoptive dad’s youngest sister who lived with them. She was thirteen years old when the babies were added to the family and was thrilled to have the babies in the house. She became very attached to all of them.

John wasn’t sure the adoption was actually legal. He seemed to remember seeing a birth certificate at one time and he was sure he had one with the Wilson name. The paperwork for birth certificates was created with the help of a lawyer in Arkadelphia, Arkansas when he was sixteen, but those were never filed either. He was never sure why. John’s adoptive mother was supposed to file the papers with the county, but she didn’t want anyone to wonder why she had waited so long to make it all legal. So she didn’t want to file them in her county. She was sure people would talk. When John tried to find the records years later, it wasn’t filed in the nearby county of Tyler either. It is all still a mystery.

John remembered his dad as a hard worker. His hands would bleed from the dry cracks in them, and then he would rub salt into them as John watched the spasm of pain cross his face. Both of his adoptive parents came from farming backgrounds, so they knew about hard work, and they expected their children to learn about hard work as well. As the children grew, they would work at one of the family farms each summer between school sessions. John said, The only thing the depression did was make rabbit hunting legal year round. I could run a rabbit down with a cold biscuit in one hand and a stick in the other. And if we had five or six kids chasing a rabbit, that poor thing could end up running into the water. Then you had him. When John was eight or nine years old, Grandpa Wilson would send him and his cousins out squirrel hunting with two shells. They were expected to bring back a mess of squirrels. So they had to get inventive. They would shoot the first squirrel, cut his head off, and throw squirrel heads to get the rest of the squirrels for dinner. But they were always taught not to catch or kill more than they could eat.

John told me the difference between a recession and a depression. A recession is when your neighbor is out of work. A depression is when you are both out of work.

John’s dad worked for the railroad as a section foreman, keeping an eye out for areas on the track that needed to be fixed. His mom would listen to the track as she rode the train back and forth to Mineola to visit her family. As she rode the train into Dad’s track section, she’d listen to the track and if there was a rough spot, she would write down the mile-marker and tell him so he could see to having it fixed. That would keep his section smooth.

One day as he rode the motorcar looking for rough spots and pulling a flatcar with tools, they hit a tie. A tamping bar tool fell off the flatcar, flew into the air, and stuck right though one of the guys working with him, killing him instantly. John’s dad felt it was his fault that the man died, because he had been operating the motorcar. So he quit his job. It really was an unavoidable accident, but he felt totally responsible. There wasn’t any OSHA then, and they just had that bar lying on the flatcar and it vibrated off.

Soon after that accident, John’s dad started working for a construction company in Oklahoma as an operating engineer. He never wanted to be more than tater deep or corn stalk high. So he would work from the ground and raise any amount of steel you needed; just don’t ask him to work up there.

John’s first memory of living in Oklahoma was when he was around five years old. A sixteen-year-old girl from their neighborhood and her girlfriend decided to teach John about the differences between girls and boys. John said he had a potential hard-on about the size of his pinky finger. I asked John if it didn’t seem strange that he was so young to know so much about sex. He said it didn’t seem strange to him. The girls were enjoying it, so he did too, but he was pretty disappointed with them when he was around sixteen years old. He knew a little more about sex then, and they wouldn’t have anything to do with him.

As the neighborhood got to know more about the triplets, it came to light that they were half-breeds. That’s how they were referred to back then, because they were half Choctaw Indian and half Polish. Oklahoma law at that time demanded that Indian children attend reservation schools only. John, Robert, and Roberta had to attend reservation school in Shawnee, Oklahoma, because they were half Choctaws. John remembered the school building looked like an old house and was also used for church on Sunday. It wasn’t the traditional brick building, just a small building, although it was probably the biggest building in town. The school was two miles from John’s home, and there were no school buses. So the kids would get up around 5:00 a.m. to be at school by 8:00 a.m. John said, We did a lot of heel-and-toe to get there in time. It seems like all my school life we lived outside of town. Before the children entered the classroom, they were instructed to take a mouthful of water and hold it. Each class was one hour long, and when they came out, they could spit the water out. And they better have something to spit. This was the way they kept the children from speaking during class. The teacher also had a cane pole that he could reach across the room to put a knot on your head when you were misbehaving. Another punishment was to bend your hand back and slap it with a ruler. The teachers were good, but they were very religious and kind of fanatical. John knew as much about the Bible as any of them because his mother’s father would stop work on the farm to read the Bible every day at two in the afternoon. All work stopped on the farm to listen to Grandpa Jones read the Bible. Reading the Bible was part of the curriculum at the mission school, which had all male teachers. I think this was the beginning of John’s attitude about being told what to do. He told me that if someone told him to do something, they might as well shit in their hand. They wouldn’t get anything out of him.

He told me stories about his dad’s parents, which always made him smile. Grandpa Wilson taught him a little saying when he was just a little tyke, maybe five years old. He and Grandpa would hear the crows cawing in the field when they were out in the farmyard, and Grandpa would say, Crow, crow, kiss my ass, and say no more. Not exactly something to teach a five-year-old, but it still made John laugh.

A story about Grandma didn’t exactly make him smile, but it did have a lasting memory. Although Grandma was blind, she was helping John with his spelling words. John kept spelling listing with two T’s. Grandma insisted there was only one T. It didn’t make sense to John that there was only one T in listing but there were two T’s in getting. They went a couple of rounds discussing the word and then Grandma’s tough love kicked in. She instructed John to get a switch. He came back with a six-foot-long peach tree limb. Well, John was very young. So maybe the switch just seemed that long, but he swears it was six feet long. She switched him with it too. She just hung on to his arm and switched him every time he spelled it wrong. He finally accepted it her way and hadn’t forgotten it since. John said, I think that’s the stupidest thing a parent can say to a child, ‘Go get me a switch.’

John could stick his own finger into the farm dirt, and nothing would grow. His grandma could stick her finger into the ground, and an orchard would grow. Because of the way she had with growing things, they never went hungry during those hard times. John said, We were so poor. The church mice brought us food, but we always had Logan gravy. Mrs. Logan made milk-white gravy and biscuits and so they named it after her. John said they ate a lot of that. On Sundays they had a fine dish of cocoa gravy as a treat. They’d have that over biscuits, like a chocolate pudding.

John was terrible about using bad language as a small child. He would get a daily chastising (ass-kicking, as he put it) for using bad words. One time his sister told him she’d bake him a cake if he didn’t cuss when the preacher came to dinner. Grandma said she’d give John a quarter for good behavior. As they were sitting down to dinner with the preacher, John looked at his sister and then at Grandma. Then he looked at his plate where there were two flies sitting on the edge of his plate. John hit the table and said, Damn your quarter and damn your cake. There ain’t no flies going to screw on my plate.

Needless to say, John didn’t get any treats. Well, he got treated. He was backhanded away from the table.

Another memory about Grandma was from springtime when the hickory tree was green and started to bud. The grandkids were instructed to go get limbs off the hickory tree and peel off the bark. Then they would bring the bark home to Grandma, so she could boil it up. They all got a dose of hickory tea to get the meanness out of them that had stored up during the winter. They’d drink that tea and shit like a tied coon. They would shit for a week. John remembered one time he was supposed to meet a girl for a date to go horseback riding. He had just taken his spring tonic and had a bad case of the runs. He rode hard over to her house to tell her he couldn’t go riding. Just as he pulled into her yard, the pain hit him. He told her he couldn’t go riding because he had to help his grandpa haul fence posts, which was a lie, but he couldn’t tell her the real reason. He finally got out of her yard riding toward home. He said every time he hit the saddle, shit flew everywhere. About halfway home, he got to the creek. Without even stopping the horse, he bailed off into the creek, washed his drawers, put them back on, and walked the rest of the way home. The horse didn’t stop when John did. That spring tonic was very effective.

That story about spring tonics reminded John about the X-lax salesman who stopped at a farmhouse and asked if he could spend the night, because he was having alternator problems and his lights wouldn’t stay on. The farmers said yes and that he could spend the night. During the night, the old farmer got up and saw the salesman’s open briefcase with all that chocolate candy in it. The old man couldn’t help himself; he ate all of it. The next morning, the salesman got up early leaving them a note saying he was sorry he couldn’t stay for breakfast, but he had to catch up on his route. A couple of years later, the salesman came by and stopped at the gate where a younger man was standing. The salesman said, Isn’t this Farmer Brown’s place? Isn’t that old Farmer Brown out there in the field?

The younger man said, Yep, sad case there.

The salesman asked, Why, what do you mean?

Well, the old man died two years ago, and we’re waiting on him to quit shitting so we can bury him.

Grandpa Jones stood about five foot eight inches, weighed around 130 pounds, and was very ornery. He used to tell the boys that they were too full of piss and vinegar. One of the things the boys did to get him to say that was helping Grandma set chickens, ducks, and turkeys. (That’s helping the eggs hatch.) Once the birds got through laying eggs, they would get to setting on them. Being the lovable boys they were, they’d taken the hen’s eggs and put them under the duck and took the duck’s eggs and put them under the hen. When they hatched, the duck would go swimming while the chicks would run up and down the bank. The baby ducks would go swimming, and the mother hen would run up and down the bank squawking. The boys loved to screw things up.

When he was young, Grandpa drove a twenty-mule team using a long black snake whip. He could pop it in all four corners of the team. John was going to be a smart-ass one day and show off how he could pop that thing too. He wound up popping himself and putting a hickey on his neck about three inch long. John swore he couldn’t hear out of that ear for three hours. He tried it one more time when he saw Zorro using a whip as a pole to swing on. John got the whip, swung it around a tree limb, and swung his little ass out over a ditch, but the leather gave way. He sailed down ass over elbows and wonders even today how he wasn’t killed from that stunt. It was one of those things that came into his mind, so he just had to try it.

Grandpa Jones was so passionate about his religion that he would let the black church use his barn for their services after their church burned to the ground. Grandpa had thirty families working for him on the farm and felt that they should have a place to hold their services too. John and his brother had a pet possum that lived in the barn loft. The black church had services one day, and the preacher was getting all carried away, preaching and clapping his hands, looking up to the ceiling and saying, How can we get God in our heart? How can we get God in our heart? As he looked up, the possum was looking down at him. He said, Goddamn, what a rat.

It wasn’t always fun and games for John’s family. The boys started hanging on the end of a crosscut saw when they were around nine years old. He also claimed he could plow behind a team of mules when he had to hold the handles of the plow over his head. He said it was a wonder he wasn’t killed. The boys would walk alongside the harrow with a crosstie on the harrow and stand on it going over rough ground. If he had fallen inside that thing, he would have been chewed up. When they would help Dad skid logs through the woods, they would stand on the logs as the horse or mule skid them. When they hit a bump, they’d all go ass over elbows. One time John and his brother were skidding big pine trees with their dad. They hit a huge rock as they were skidding, and the mules went clear through their darn harnesses. The harnesses were ruined, so they had to get more hickory to make new harnesses. They would all work hard like that and then go help Grandpa on the farm.

John told me he used to have watermelon britches. It had the whole seat out of them. He said that way it kept the flies away from your mouth while you were eating the watermelon. John gave Grandpa Jones credit for making cotton picking more interesting by planting watermelons in the same patch. They would work awhile in the summer heat and then come to a ripe watermelon as they walked down the cotton rows with a cotton bag on their back. They would kick one of those watermelons until it burst open. The heart of the melon was eaten first and the rest as they went through the field. Grandpa Jones never cared how many watermelons they ate as long as the cotton got picked. Grandpa could feed a whole family reunion on two chickens. Just before dinner, he would bring out thirty watermelons to start snacking on. When dinner was ready, everyone was too full to eat. John said, He was tighter than a bark on a tree.

Grandpa Jones was really hard to get along with, though. He had told John’s mother that he thought John should be put into reform school. That’s when John threatened to blow his brains out.

John and Robert had a movie date back in their early teens. The boys were around twelve years old and worked on the farm with Grandpa Jones. If Grandpa knew they had plans, he would make them stay and work. He didn’t want the devil to get into them. The project that day was to cut fence posts, load them into his new wagon, and bring them up to the house. When they were through, he said they could go to town. He made them use the stubborn mules, Tony and Adder, who wouldn’t move when they got to the creek until they were good and ready. They would just sit there until they were ready to go home. Robert was smarter than the average bear and had brought along some dog push. This was used to keep the dogs out of Grandma’s garden and flowerbeds. Robert filled a spray gun. When the boys had all the fence posts loaded, they started toward the creek. The mules stopped. Robert went out on the tongue and started pouring dog push all over the crack of their ass. By the time he got back to the seat of the wagon, that stuff had taken hold, and those mules started to run. They cleared the creek with the boys coming along right behind them. The mules made a smooth maneuver getting between two white oak trees, but unfortunately leaving behind the four wheels of the wagon didn’t work out so well. As they ran up a rise, the mules left behind the wheelless wagon. When they got to the barn, all they had left was the wagon tongue and doubletree. Robert and John looked at the situation, weighed the good and the bad of their prospects of a friendly survival, and decided they should get their stuff together and go find Mom and Dad. They threw their stuff into a suitcase and started to thumb their way to Corsicana, Texas, where their dad was working. The folks didn’t make them go back because they seemed to understand the severity of the situation too. From then on, the boys worked with their dad.

John’s mom had her share of health problems. In 1936, she had both breasts removed, and in those days they did a pretty radical removal, which was difficult for her to accept. She also had migraine headaches. Sometimes she would take so many aspirin that she would have to have her stomach pumped.

During that time, his adoptive family lost track of his biological family. The last address that his biological mother had for the triplets was New London, Texas. In March 1937, that school exploded from a natural gas leak and killed almost three hundred kids. John’s biological mother thought her triplets could have been killed in that tragedy. The Wilson family tried to keep in contact with her by tracking her husband’s construction jobs, but they would have usually moved on by the time they found them again. John’s adoptive family moved around a lot too as his dad chased jobs around the area during the depression. Sometimes the family would camp out at a park, like at White Rock Lake. It was a big wide-open place for them to play and fish. The kids would fish all day while Dad worked.

One time John, Robert, and Roberta got a job cutting someone’s yard. They went to Porky Pig hamburger stand and bought a bunch of hamburgers with their earnings and took them home to share. Their mother just couldn’t get over that they had worked so hard all afternoon and bought food for everyone.

John’s dad had been working as a longshoreman getting paid at the end of each day. He was so proud of earning $300 for one twelve-hour-day loading cotton on a ship. His dad said that was the most money he had ever seen in his life. John used to enjoy going down there to load cotton too. He and one of his cousins would truck cotton on a two-wheel dolly. The cotton trucks carried six-hundred-pound bales and they could run those bales as fast as the loading crew could board them onto the ship. They would make a competition out of the work