Baptists, Bibles, and Bourbon in the Barn: the Stories, the Characters, and the Haunting Places of a West (O'mg) Kentucky Childhood.

By Allan Wilford Howerton

Baptists, Bibles, and Bourbon in the Barn is a spunky memoir about growing up in Western Kentucky during the roaring twenties, the Great Depression, and the run up to World War II. Written from the viewpoint of a kids bottom-up perspective of the fundamentalist Baptist culture of the era, it is a story of preachers shouting fire and brimstone, a cow-sow-hen economy of unpainted barns and farmhouses, kerosene lamps, outhouses, fiddling music, Bourbon whiskey, hordes of relatives, hardship, death, and survival. But it is also a story of love, graced by nostalgia in remembrance of a time that is gone.

MORE ON THE WRITING OF BAPTISTS, BIBLES, BOURBON, BARN.

From Cave-in Rock, Illinois, where pirates once played havoc with shipping along the Ohio River, one can look across to the rivers south bank in Western Kentucky. There, in the early 1830s, Tapley Howerton, the authors greatgreat-grandfather plunked his family on land along Crooked Creek in what was then Livingston (now Crittenden) County. It was a bum decision. He was soon to suffer a tragic and unexpected fate. It had the effect of trapping his descendents in an economic and cultural backwater, dominated by religious fundamentalists, for several generations.

Almost one hundred years later, Allan Wilford Howerton, Tapleys great-great-grandson, was born on a tenant farm not far away in the Tradewater River bottoms of Crittenden County. Not knowing of Tapley until much later in life, he would research his past and produce what eventually became Baptists, Bibles, and Bourbon in the Barn. It is the authors early-life story and a tale of Tapley and his legacy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781493109036

Allan Wilford Howerton

Allan Wilford Howerton, a Western Kentucky native, is a World War II infantry veteran and a retired federal civil servant. He is a graduate of the University of Denver (B.A. in international relations,1948; M.A.,1951) He also studied at Drexel University and Shrivenham American University, England. Following retirement, he worked in local politics and was a founder and general manager of a local cable television channel. He writes, Allan says, for the joy of remembering and to put off, as long as possible, the perils of forgetting. He and his wife, Joan, a registered nurse, live in Alexandria, Virginia.

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Copyright © 2013 by Allan Wilford Howerton.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2013917873

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4931-0902-9

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4931-0901-2

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4931-0903-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a memoir, a true story, based on memory augmented by genealogical and historical records plus newspaper items primarily from The Crittenden Press, the county weekly published at Marion, Kentucky. The characters, places, and events are real. Conversational narrative is based upon the author’s perception of what would likely have occurred given the people involved and the circumstances and events described. The COVER PHOTO is from a late 1920s reunion of the Samuel and Ida Railey family, the author’s maternal grandparents. Other photographs, primarily of the Howerton and Railey families, are from the author’s personal collection.

Rev. date: 10/29/2013

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Contents

Author’s Note

Prologue

A Little Ways West of the Bluegrass

PART I

Tapley’s Ghost

Chapter One

Little Chickee… Don’t Go

Chapter Two

What’s this about Henry?

Chapter Three

Tapley’s Ghost

Chapter Four

Muddy Love Reprised

Chapter Five

Little Kid, Big City

Chapter Six

Living on the Railroad

Chapter Seven

Rocky Roads and Sugar Cane

Chapter Eight

Away in a Manger

Chapter Nine

The Shouting on the Hilltop

Chapter Ten

Tapley’s Legacy… The Howertons

Chapter Eleven

Uncle Sam’s Doggy, Horsey Acres

Chapter Twelve

Dawson Springs: Skinny Dipping and Ice Cream

Chapter Thirteen

The Light Under the Door

Chapter Fourteen

Wilted Flowers and Sears Roebuck

PART II

Bye, Bye, Tapley’s Ghost

Chapter Fifteen

The Magic Lantern

Chapter Sixteen

The Vagabond and the Magic Cigar Box

Chapter Seventeen

Called to Preach

Chapter Eighteen

The Preacher Takes a Wife

Chapter Nineteen

The Other Side of the Treadwater

Chapter Twenty

Send Ole Troxel Out For Gin

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

For Joan, Mark, Leslie, and Barbara

and in memory of my father

Bonnie Roy Howerton

and

my mother

Alma Neal Railey Howerton

who, if there is a heaven,

are in each others arms.

Alma Railey Howerton

October 14. 1895-January 16, 1933

This book draws its inspiration from memories of

my mother, who for nine years, four months,

and ten days, gave me her love.

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What right do you have to

intrude into their lives like this?

How can you presume to be so intimate?

Or is it simply the past that you are

looking at–empirical, true, and over?

Frederick Reuss

MOHR: a novel

008_a_danica.tif

Useful memories from one’s subconscious

produces unpleasant self-absorption. It puts you

in contact with long-dead friends, good

buddies, people you have loved

. . . .

There is sadness in that.

Tony Hillerman

SELDOM DISAPPOINTED

Author’s Note

I (remember) only the first crack of the machine guns. Instinctively, I hit the ground. Above us the tracers were only a foot or two over our heads. My first thoughts were to try to visualize the terrain where we were in relation to the direction of the tracers and wonder if they could lower their fire. I concluded that they could. I do not remember hearing Carpenter yelling or any other sound save the rattle of the machine guns and the swish of the overhead bullets.

Forgetting our training to crawl out from under overhead fire and keep going, I started clawing at the ground with my hands trying to bury myself into it. But I was lying in a field of fully-grown sugarbeets. Not one gave way to my tugs. Then, besotted with fear, I must have drifted into a kind of trance. Several old men were sitting around the stove in the back of my uncle’s grocery store and post office. They were talking about me and evidently some years had passed since the Second World War. One was saying:

Remember ‘Red’ Howerton’s boy? Used to live up there by Doss Nation didn’t they?

Yeah, killed in the war, wasn’t he? another replied.

Believe maybe he was. ‘Red’ was pretty broke up about it.

He lost his wife, too, didn’t he? Some people have all the luck.

Then ‘Red’ married the Nation girl. Old-maid school teacher, wasn’t she?

"Think so. They said the boy, don’t remember his name, was smart.

Finished way up there in his class over at the Sturgis High–that where they moved to? Said he mighta’ made a senator or been a governor. Yeah, too bad. That war took a lot of ’em. ‘Red’ never got over it, they said."

Excerpt, "Dear Captain, et al.: the Agonies and the Ecstasies of War and Memory, a Memoir from World War II"

by Allan Wilford Howerton

Red’s boy never made a senator or a governor. But he didn’t die there in the Siegfried Line on the way to Lindern, Germany in the early morning darkness of November 29, 1944. Red would call it a miracle. If so, it was performed through an alert young lieutenant who broke the trance by a slap on the butt enabling an escape. Thankfully, following a long and productive life, this book attempts to gather Red’s story, and that of my own, from the dusty recesses of memory.

The memories, even so far out in time are not always pleasant. But it now seems important to confront them anew. And, hopefully, they constitute a good story with a moral. Woody Allen’s view that much of life is simply showing up may be true. But it is also true that much of life is guided, if not always precisely determined, by childhood experiences. We, of course, often rise above or find our way around them. Nevertheless, they remain as an influence not easily set aside.

Since college, and its smothering overload of behavioral psychology, I have flaunted, perhaps too stridently, what I have prized as my non-Freudian proclivities and worshiped at an altar of rationality devoid of childhood influences. Or so I thought. Actually it was little more then a losing effort to blot out, for whatever reasons, the persistent ghosts and goblins of those early years. And so we set out across the treacherous shoals of the past to try and explain the paths taken and not taken. It is a risky venture but hopefully less so than that of the sugar-beet field that long-ago November morning.

Readers may wonder about the title. Some may think it flippant and disrespectful of a great Protestant denomination, a majestic and holy book, a magnificent American whiskey, and a unique and wonderful part of the American milieu. But for it I make no apologies. Religious fundamentalists, particularly Baptists, who do not like their beliefs and practices put under the skeptical microscopic stare of a kid’s bottom-up perspective, may have problems relating to this book. Yet I hope they will view it for what it is–a forthright report in good humor of how I remember the time within their flock. While I took another pathway through the riddle of life, those early years within the clutches of Baptist ways and mores never quite left me. As much as I disparage many of their affects, the recollections are also treasured, and I am particularly thankful for the words and cadences of the King James Version of the Holy Bible, which still ring majestically within my soul. This, as good Baptists are wont to say, was the saving grace.

Most of what is written here is true. Yet, reading what I have set down reminds of the admonition of the great Emily Dickinson to tell the whole truth but tell it slant. Unknowingly, I think, I may have staggered into the slant. I am comfortable there because what is perceived as truth looking backward and what was true at the time may be different. And yet, I wonder. Did I ever really think that life among the flock in Western Kentucky during the Great Depression was superb?

Through stories and memories, however faulty, I have tried to capture the essence of that upbringing within a locale that is drastically altered and a cultural milieu that no longer exists. For much – but not all – of that, thanks be to God!

I ask my readers to approach cautiously, incredulous and with some measure of awe, in accompanying me as we traverse the ever-lingering cache of misty memories that haunt and challenge. Like Peter, looking out from the boat in Galilee, it is all too easy to see only a ghost walking.

Prologue

A Little Ways West of the Bluegrass

L ike Gaul of first-year Latin, the Commonwealth of Kentucky of my youth was divided into three parts. There was the more prosperous middle centering on Louisville, Lexington, and Frankfort, the state capital. It was a land of manicured fields hemmed by white board fences and graced by thoroughbred horses and pretty women; or, some said, fast women and pretty horses. In the Appalachian Mountains to the east, coal dominated. It was a place of feuds, miners’ strikes, and hardscrabble living ruled by predatory mine owners, union bosses, and hillbilly clans.

We in the West knew little of either. Ours was a world of small farms: a cow, sow, hen economy a notch above fifty acres and a mule. Small plain-Jane homes–characteristically unpainted, with makeshift barns, often leaning, and scruffy outbuildings–peppered the rolling hills. Here coal mining was an important part of the economy. But the deep mines in this area required little surface space and were barely noticed. In marked contrast to the Appalachian region to the East, we never considered coal as dominant, although it may have been near that. Here, as elsewhere, it was easy to ignore what one wanted to not believe. In the West we had our pride. We were better than those feudin’ and fightin’ Eastern hillbillies.

Yet our landscape offered little in the way of bragging rights. Overgrown foliage along rows of rusty barbwire fencing delineated the cornfields and cow pastures. Few whiteboard fences here. No sleekly groomed racing horses either. There were women though, even some fast ones although we never thought of them as such, perhaps due to gangly home-sewed dresses over sun-baked bare legs. In even greater contrast to well-groomed race horses and spiffy women of the famed Bluegrass to our east, there were lots of hogs rooting in mud-holes near the barns and retarded cows, bulls and heifers alike, standing dumbly in rainy and misty fields or up to their knees in mossy ponds. Chickens dominated many a backyard right up to the doorway.

Electricity, in the dark ages before the Tennessee Valley Authority, existed only in small towns built around courthouses in county seats and a few other small settlements. Here there were a few blocks of paved streets and sidewalks. Two-lane roads, largely unpaved gravel, connected them. Across the countryside dirt roads predominated, coughing up clouds of dust in summer and axle-deep mud in winter. In the days and weeks before local elections, oil was often spread on the roads to dissipate the dust. Over the years this was gradually packed into the soil to provide a measure of smoothness, particularly as automobiles came on with their wide balloon tires flattening the narrow tracks of wagons and horse-drawn buggies.

As darkness came, kerosene lamps lit up the clapboard houses and swinging lanterns floated around the barns as the chores were finished. As time went by, long insulated copper wires might be seen strung between tall trees feeding signals to Atwater Kent radios sporting tall turkey-neck loudspeakers and, a bit later, Crosley radios with their characteristic oval tops gracing their tasteful wood cabinets. Listeners stared into the yellow glow of their minute dial slots while creating mind-images and dreams of faraway places.

Old Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogs provided toilet wipes in chilly, smelly outhouses with odors suppressed a mite by stingy sprinklings of lime. On pleasant evenings, by the light of a lantern while fulfilling nature’s call, one could thumb the catalogs and dream of young women seen modeling gingham dresses and silky underwear. Or one could covet sleek hunting rifles, big balloon-tired bicycles with coaster brakes, highly varnished sleds for the coming winter snows, and other sundry merchandise out of reach of our wallets. Sunday preachers, at pulpits in clapboard wooden churches dotting the landscape, railed against such sensuous and materialistic dreams. Yet, that only added to the longings.

I would like to say that the towering steeples of these churches gave grace, elegance, and style to the countryside but that would be false. This was Baptist, or if not that, Presbyterian and Methodist territory and steeples sporting crosses were Catholic and suspect. It was not wine country either. Swallows of grape juice in little individual cups were passed at monthly communion. Yet there was moonshine brewed in stills smartly hidden in many woods and flasks of bourbon whiskey were stashed in the barns. Here Sunday afternoon craps, poker, and other games of chance nourished by chewing tobacco and smoke from corncob pipes substituted for after-dinner brandy in the drawing rooms of English ancestors.

Pleasures of other types were taken amid sweet-smelling haylofts and new mown fields. Human nature was not denied. Such trysts were not, however, flaunted although there were whispers, often wistful, as to those who partook of these joys of the sins of the flesh. On Saturday nights, soirees, called play-parties, filling the soft air with the music of fiddles and guitars, provided backdrops for romance culminating sometimes in romps in the hay. Gradually, as the automobile age came on and open-top roadsters replaced curtained buggies, romantic liaisons became a bit less discreet; an early lamentable sign of the coarsening of the culture. But the age of letting it all hang out when it came to sexuality was still far off.

Shielded from such distractions, my world was a tiny railroad village called Repton. Horizons extended not much beyond the nearby towns of Marion, Sturgis, Morganfield, Clay, and Providence and the small cities of Madisonville and Paducah. Some fifty miles away, the industrial city of Evansville, on the Ohio River in Indiana, provided occasional glimpses of life across the Mason-Dixon line. But a venture there was rare and of special occasion. Even rarer were jaunts to the nearest metropolis where the St. Louis Cardinals played baseball and Dizzy Dean tossed fastballs and curves at the bats of the Chicago Cubs, then, believe it or not, a formidable power in the National League. Mostly, though, we took our baseball from golden voiced radio announcers like Ronald Reagan who, from a studio in Iowa and elsewhere, read teletypes and created fictional play-by-play descriptions spewing from the Atwater Kent and Crosley radios.

A few could afford automobiles and enough gasoline at ten to eighteen cents per gallon to make an occasional trip to Nashville, Tennessee, more than a hundred miles away, for a Saturday night at the Grand Old Opry. Radios blared the hillbilly Bible-thumping Opry music from fifty-thousand-watt, WSM Nashville. But these sounds were challenged as time passed and we would-be sophisticates and teen-age denizens of culture decried the Opry in embarrassment and went around humming the latest swing tunes from the top ten of The Hit Parade. I was destined to become one of these counter-culture insurgents as my worldview gradually expanded. Yes, there were cultural clashes symbolized by musical tastes even then. Nothing new under the sun, thus sayeth the preacher in the sacred Book of Ecclesiastes, Holy Bible as well as the preachers at the little Baptist church on Repton hill as they railed about the sins brought on by that old music.

Yet the refrains of the music, along with the unpainted barns, the cornfields, and the backyard chickens dominate still the sounds and images of my early world. We do not will the locales of our youth. They are chosen for us. The memories of that time in rural Kentucky are wonderful and dreadful, comical and gloomy, uplifting and depressing, and often shrouded with heartache. For much of the time I was frightened, scared of the future, and remained so for a very long time.

What I didn’t realize was that I was growing up among a marvelous sample of prototype American characters of the old Middle South as the New Deal began. While often maddening and tediously irksome in the eyes of their offspring, they were good folk, certain of their God, and secure in their view of the world and their place within it; a degree of confidence that I was never to share. Now they are forever gone. Yet their legacies linger still as they, for better or for worse, formed the pattern of my life.

PART I

Tapley’s Ghost

My great-great-grandfather, Tapley Howerton, was a roamer.

He came into Western Kentucky in the early eighteen-thirties

and suffered a strange and unexpected fate. It stuck his

descendants in an economic and cultural backwater for

several generations. Had it not happened there

would be no story.

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Chapter One

Little Chickee… Don’t Go

F rom the river the land slopes imperceptibly toward a row of low hills. The little unpainted house, seemingly in constant construction, stands about the middle of the narrow strip of bottomland hemmed in by the river and the ridge beyond. Its black soil is enriched by sediment from occasional flooding of the river. Backwater it is called. The farmers know its value. A foot or so of foundation stones elevate the little house from the muddy waters that sometimes feed the soil.

On a bright summer day the land is crisp and dry. A child, a toddler barely out of diapers, emerges from behind the house. Having shed his winter coat, his bright blue rompers covering his chubby figure and starched white blouse contrasts sharply with the dull, weathered planking of the house. The broad, lacy-like collar of the blouse riding high around his neck makes him look like an Elizabethan dandy.

The little fellow bumbles along determinedly. He is trying to arouse the interest of a chicken, a half-gown pullet heading straightway for the river.

"Little chickee . . . little chickee, he calls urgently. Little chickee. Wait. Finally the pullet pauses momentarily, glancing back at the child. Little Chickee . . . little Chickee . . . don’t go, urges the toddler. Little Chickee . . . don’t go down there. Old hawk ’ill getcha."

But the pullet tools on. Oblivious to the child’s pleading, it increases its pace. The toddler tries desperately to catch up. After a few paces he stops and utters one last baleful warning:

Little Chickee! Don’t go down there. Old hawk ’ill gettcha!

As the chick rushes on, its red Plymouth Rock feathers dashing along the dark green of the tree line marking the river’s banks, the toddler stops and bursts into tears.

The chicken is lost to the hawk, he figures, by its stubborn unheeding persistence. Abandoning the chase he runs in full cry back toward the little house. Back to a place free of peril.

Hearing his cries, a black-haired young woman in a loose-flowing gingham dress, rushes from around the corner of the house toward him. As he grasps her skirt she lifts him into her arms.

It’s alright, she whispers into his ear. Daddy will be home soon. He’ll chase away the old hawk. Don’t worry. It will be fine.

Daddy? Daddy will save the little chickee? he asks as he buries his tears in her jet-black flowing hair and tightens his grip around her soothing neck.

He is safe now. In his mother’s arms he knows that Daddy can, indeed, do anything.

There is no memory of this. The story was told to me later. Perhaps I have exaggerated it. We moved from the little house, surrounded by the rich bottomland, when I was two or three. It seems doubtful that I could have been so articulate. Maybe it happened someplace else. Or on a subsequent visit.

The latter is unlikely. We never, insofar as I know, came back to the place of the hawks haunting the woods by the river. Sometime later, an uncle lived there. His wife, my Aunt Zela, was reputed to be a poor housekeeper; the place was nearly always unkempt, it was said. Many of my relatives seldom graced its doors. I felt ashamed to have ever lived there myself and rarely acknowledged it. However, this little episode played a significant role in my life.

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Chapter Two

What’s this about Henry?

Who is the old gentleman?

The large, fading photograph housed in a chipped wood frame bearing several coats of heavily applied varnish rested on the floor propped against the wall of what was called the den. It was actually a converted outbuilding, a former smokehouse, about twenty feet from the backdoor of the farmhouse that was part of the small farm my father bought while I was away during World War II. It became his place of refuge, providing the peace and quiet he needed to study his Bible, play his fiddle, clean his rifle and shotgun, and drink his Pepsi Cola, to which he became addicted in old age. It was also free of the nagging orderliness/cleanliness policing of my prissy stepmom who managed the house as if it were a sanitarium. I had first seen the picture while home from college in 1946 or ’47.

It’s my grandfather, Henry Howerton. You don’t remember it?

My great-grandfather, then. No, I don’t remember that picture or knowing anything about him.

Well, Son, it was stored away in a closet. She–meaning my stepmother–never wanted it in the house. A bit tacky I guess she thought. She cleaned out the closet one day and wanted to get rid of it. But I brought it out here. Thought it might be worth hanging on to.

It sounded like my stepmom and was an irritating reminder of my years of adapting to what I considered her strange and perverse ways. But the attitude toward the old ancestral picture wasn’t, in the culture of our particular class in the area at that time, peculiar or confined to her. My relatives were