My Grains of Sand: Its Been Great-Almost

By Kitt Foxx

This is the story of my upbringing in Georgia, the post-Depression days of the 1930–1950s, my school years, puberty, those problems with the bullies in school, learning how to fight, my teen years, problems with authority, learning how to make money legally and illegally, falling in love, marriage of twenty-five years, my first wife’s serious health problems, our children, why we moved to Arizona for my first wife’s survival, the story of my second marriage of forty-two years, and my second wife’s untimely death.

This is a love story of the two women in my life and how we remained friends and family through it all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796035216

Kitt Foxx

RETIRED FORMER TRADE SCHOOL TEACHER AND HEATING AND AIR CONDITIONING TECH. FOR 30 YEARS, ORIGINALLY FROM ROSWELL GEORGIA. NOW. RESIDING IN THE BEAUTIFUL VILLAGE OF PINE ARIZONA. IN THE FOOTHILLS OF THE NORTHERN ARIZONA MOUNTAINS. GOD’S SPECIAL PLACE FOR WEARY WARRIORS.

Book preview

PRELUDE

EVERYTHING HAS A BEGINNING AND AN END, THIS IS THE STORY OF MY BEGINING, AND LEADING UP TO MY END. IT ALL STARTED WITH TWO PEOPLE. THAT LOVED EACH OTHER, MY MOM AND DAD . UNDER SOME OF THE DIREST POST DEPRESSION CIRCUMSTANCES IN THE LATE 1920s AND EARLY 1930s IN CHEROKEE COUNTY GEORGIA. I WAS THE OLDEST OF THE SIX CHILDREN THAT WERE TO FOLLOW MY BIRTH, AND ON A COLD NIGHT IN LATE NOVEMBER IN 1934 IN A SMALL TWO ROOM SHARE CROPPER SHACK ON A TEN ACRE CORN AND COTTON FARM ON RURAL ROUTE 2 WOODSTOCK GEORGIA I CAME INTO THIS WORLD, KICKING AND SCREAMING, AND THE STORY OF HOW WE LIVED, LOVED AND PROGRESSED FROM THAT DAY FOWARD.FOR MY NEXT 84 YEARS OF LIFE, IS PARTIALLY COVERED IN THIS STORY. SOME PAIN, SOME JOY & SOME DREAMS WERE PART OF THIS, AND SOME OF THOSE DREAMS WERE SADLY LOST. AND SOME OF THE JOYS CAME TO PASS, BUT THATS LIFE,!!! AND THERE ARE NO GUARANTEES THAT COMES WITH LIFE. . JUST KEEP TRYING.TO ACHIEVE YOUR GOALS. MY GRAINS OF SAND. IS PART OF THE STORY OF THOSE BATTLES. TRY TO STAY FOCUSED NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS, IN YOUR LIFE. AND DONT EVER GIVE UP.!!!

CHAPTER ONE

MOM AND DAD

My beginning started on January 20 1910 when my father, James Allen Foster was born, he was the fourth child born.to a country Methodist preacher the Reverend James Manson Foster and his wife Arti Kuykendall Foster Dad was raised in southern Cherokee County Georgia and grew up working on their farm with one younger brother, one older sister and two older brothers the boys hunted, fished, and helped provide for the family, The South was still in the long term recovery stage from the Civil War when their moms and Dads married, and times were hard, money was very scarce and hard work was the rule. If you survived. My mother Mary Lou Grimes was the fifteenth child of sixteen born to another farmer and Baptist preacher the Reverend Samuel Benjamin Grimes. known County wide as Sam Grimes the biggest man in the county at 7 feet plus tall, and his wife was Mary Emma Smith Grimes, he was a very successful farmer in those days with thirteen girls and three boys born into the family only two of the boys and thirteen girls survived to become adults. They all were working on the farm as they each grew up ; the eldest son Arthur was tragically killed in his sixteenth year by a tree falling on him on a windy day in November while he and his father were cutting firewood for the winter. Two more girls were lost early as infants by diseases that had no known cures at that time, . doctors were few, and miles away in those rural areas. My Mother was also a hard worker, she worked the fields just like her brothers and the rest of her family had always done. All of the skills necessary to survive and maintain a home were taught to the young girls by their mother, as well as the farm work by their father and brothers. An education was not as necessary as the ability to survive was in those days. Farm work was hot tiring work for all of them in their youth. Six full days from daylight until dark in the summer.

Mom met my dad met at her father’s church, Rock Springs Baptist Church at the age of nineteen, they were married two years later on October 20th. Nineteen thirty-two. I was born on November twenty third nineteen thirty-four over behind that same Church about a half mile, over by the River called Bottom Land on a share cropped ten-acre farm on rural route two Woodstock Georgia. Dad and mom had located other farm for sale a few miles north east of their present location in what was known then as Earney Town and Mom and Dad borrowed nine hundred dollars from her father to buy the forty acres with a house and barn, It also had a good water well. it 1was purchased from Mr. Norman Wright of that same community, we live there and farmed corn and cotton until a few months after WW2 was declared, in 1941. We moved, in the spring of 1942 to the community of Sandy Springs, down south closer to Atlanta. Dad had secured a job in Atlanta in nineteen forty, with a large company, The Atlantic Ice And Coal Company as a mechanic maintaining their delivery trucks, and later they expanded into the beer market with Atlantic Ale and Beer in 1942 he transferred over on Cain street where the new Brewery was located, there in the truck shop where he helped maintain their delivery trucks, that left mom and I to work the farm up in Cherokee County, and now I was learning how my mom grew up, yes!! lots of hard work. Dad always came home on the weekends when possible. Sometimes in the winter the roads were so bad and muddy it was impossible to drive All the way home, he would park the car out on the main road and walk the mile and a half or so to the farm, He could not yet afford to purchase a car, so he borrowed one that needed lots of work on the engine from his mother’s brother his uncle Raymond, and did the repairs on it for the use of it at the shop he worked at in Atlanta. That was called The barter factor . It was used a lot in lieu of money in those days.

Mom and I were the farmers, in nineteen forty I was six years old and mom had taught me how to chop, and pick cotton and we had lots of it to pick before it started falling off the stalk in the early harvest season and also how to replant and harvest the corn crop. I was taught to drive the mule that pulled the wagon while mom pulled the corn from the stalk and threw it into the wagon in the fall when it was ripe, and sometimes I was allowed to drive the mule from the fields to the corn crib down by the barn, we were a team she said. We sat and shucked the corn later, usually on those rainy, dreary days that were too wet to work outside or in the fields. She taught me lots of things about life on the farm, another of my jobs was to gather the eggs in a basket every morning about 6:30 .from the chicken nests and get them into the house without breaking or cracking any, if they got any damage, we ate those for breakfast My brother Troy was born on November the seventh nineteen thirty seven, and my job in the spring and summer his first year was to keep the flies and ants off him out at the edge of the field in the woods and shade next to the corn and cotton fields on a quilt she put there in the shade for us while she worked in the fields, Mom wanted to be in the field and working by 8 am every day except Sunday. That’s the day we walked thru the woods to the Methodist church that my grandfather Foster preached at, Sunday school was at 8 am and we were usually there for that. A real treat was when grandpa drove us home from church in his car, that was fun. Monday it was back to the fields and the weed hoeing. Troy and I kept moving to stay in the shade and we had some warm water to drink when thirsty, I tried to keep it under a bush to keep it cool longer, and that was life in the country in those summer days on the farm. Just the three of us and my pet Squirrel that dad got for me that spring, but mom got mad at him when he was accidentally shut up in Moms sewing machine drawer and he chewed the corner of the drawer that night, and made a big hole there, she was really mad about that and was going to cook him and I cried, so She had Dad take him back into the woods the next time he came home and turn him loose the next day after he was home, and I never saw him again. His name was Curly because of his tail. He had to be alone in the house all day, but I always left him some peanuts and water while we were gone. And he was happy to see me in the afternoons and we played on the floor. But Mom didn’t like him, she always looked at him like she wanted to cook him. He was the only pet I had until Dad came home with a little puppy dog that I named Wiggles. He was a short-legged Collie mom said, and I kept him for 14 years, until he died after we had moved down to Sandy Springs. He was a very good dog, and we played together for hours sometimes. He liked to hide and go seek, he was good at that. he loved to play tag also with a bunch of the neighborhood boys and girls in our back yard. Wiggles was a good boy. And I was very sad and cried almost all-day mom said when he died. Mom helped me to bury him out beyond the garden next to the woods and put a marker with his name burned on it by mom and a Red-hot coat hanger, and I put some flowers there in a vase mom gave me. He was 11 or 12 years old.

CHAPTER TWO

ITS WAR !!!!

My mom was an amazing person, she was a very hard worker, her dad believed that his girls should work in the fields just like his boys did except for real heavy lifting she could work my dad so hard he would have to take a break, and when I was 6 and learning about farming, she would take three rows of replanting corn to my one, and I had to hurry to keep up with her, and years later when we were feeding Chickens, I carried a 5 gallon bucket of feed while she carried a one hundred pound sack of feed under her arm and just shook it into the feeders, I was 15 and I couldn’t do that, I always had a problem just picking it up. carrying it like she did was not an option, Mom was a very strong lady, and had a temper to match if you got on her wrong side, even Dad didn’t want her upset over anything, she got real bossy, real quick, and could back it up if she had too. When she was on the warpath, we all found some place to go and something to do. Quickly!!! I tried arm wrestling her one time at the kitchen table, when I was between 15 and 16. notice I said ONE time!! I should have known better, it was embarrassing. Ten out of ten times by my mother. I never told anyone about that. I bet she could have beat my dad also. She didn’t look that strong. But o boy.!!!

Mom started acting strange sometimes a few years after Dad died, in 1964, We had spent so much time together I think I was the only one to notice it and I had no idea as to what or why, but she seemed to forget lots of things that had happened recently, and I guess I was so involved with my own problems that I didn’t consider that she had a really big problem, she was hiding, she still had 3 of the younger ones at home and no more farm or chickens to work, she was almost 60 and Dad had been gone about 5 or 6 years she met one of her old school mates again, he was also widowed and they had a few Church dates and he popped the question, I guess she called all of us kids and ask how we felt about her remarrying and we all thought it was a great idea. All the children had left home and she was lonesome; they were married for about 9— 10 years, I think.,until one morning he didn’t get out of bed for breakfast, he had died in his sleep, she was alone again. She and my baby sister Debbie lived together for a few years until she got married, and she then moved in with my oldest Sister Sandra after she had lost her Husband. Mom had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease since her second husband’s death, and now it was progressing rapidly and as hard as my sister tried, several times she just wandered off the property and got lost, so that’s when she had to be moved to a Alzheimer’s care center, where at the age of 88 she passed away and was buried at Rock Springs Baptist Church next to my Dad. So that’s how all 7 of us Fosters became Orphans.

Dad Sold the farm and moved us in the spring of forty two, after WW 2 started, he was afraid he would be drafted into the Army, we moved down to Sandy Springs south of Roswell closer to Atlanta and on the local bus line because mom never learned to drive a car, and Roswell had no bus service at that time. Dad had never owned a car since they had been married in 1933. He had always borrowed one if needed. Since the war had started he realized that if he was away in the Army we would be stranded up in the country on the farm, at least there was a local bus line that we could ride to Buckhead it was only a 10 cent fare, from Sandy Springs, and for shopping for things that were not available locally, groceries were delivered to your home and put on your table for you, that’s if you had a phone to call in your list to the local grocery Dad had one installed the first week we were in Sandy Springs. Dad was sure planning ahead for the three of us. He received his notice to report to Fort McPherson out in East Point Ga. for his physical for the Army, he was there for two and a half weeks before to came home with a 4F classification physical handicap he had fallen off the pig pen fence when he was nine years old and broke his right arm below the elbow, the nearest doctor was twelve miles away, so his mom set it as best she could, with a screaming nine year old kid, and wrapped it up with long strips of cloth torn from an old bed sheet, it grew back crooked, needless to say dad was surprised, because he didn’t remember this at all, and had never been a problem for him, and he had never noticed that that arm was crooked. That’s what kept him out of the war.in March of 1942.

So he came back home, and applied the next day to a help wanted ad. in the Marietta Ga. newspaper for the Bell Aircraft Corp in Marietta .they were now tooling up to build the new huge B29 Bomber, and the P39 fighter plane and needing men and women there to help in the war effort. He was there until the spring of forty-six, when the plant closed. It was the best paying job He had ever had, and he was able to purchase his first car now, and then he also participated in a carpool traveling to work each day to Marietta, with four other people. Almost everything pertaining to a car was rationed, tires and auto parts were extremely important and very difficult to find new, so used parts were traded for and sold sometimes at horrendous black market prices, luckily dad was an expert mechanic and not only repaired his car but lots of his friends and relatives that needed help. No new cars or trucks were made for sale to the public from 1941––1946 and people wanting new cars after 1946 were required in some instances to pay for the new car up front. The demand was so great that if you paid for it in 1946, you were lucky if you got it by 1948 that’s how many people were smiling again having a car that didn’t break down every week and cost a fortune to have repaired if parts could be found for it. In those days a new car was a real thrill and something to celebrate, they were about $1800.00 if you could pay cash. And $ 2200.00 if on credit. Something new was started. By the Automotive Manufacturing company’s Credit Financing for returning vets if you had a job,and also the F.H.A. Was born not long after that for financial services when buying a home or building one. Lots of money and credit was available to the vets, lending Organizations were now being started, the Boom was now in action, and continued for years until most of the economy leveled out again, lots of new things were happening now after the war was over.in 1945. Wives and kids could smile again knowing that dad would be coming home now any day. VICTORY was the word for the survivors, even the wounded were cheering, and only very few of the dead were returned home, most were buried over there, .and some were never found. And the A bomb was now the subject of Conversations all over the World, a miracle of necessity for us, or a curse on humanity and the world, we had no idea of what was to come into our lives because of this A bomb discovery, but the population of the U.S.A. was War Weary. That I remember very well.

CHAPTER THREE

SCHOOL AND LIFE IN THE CITY

I started first grade in school in the country at Big Springs Elementary in September before I was six in November, about three months early, the school was kinda next door up on a hill from Big Springs Methodist church. It was a little over a mile thru the woods alongside a small stream of water coming from the spring down behind the church to our property, and on past to another large lake beyond our property. Dad used some white paint to mark the trees up thru these woods to the spring so I wouldn’t lose my way to and from the school. It was quite a hike for me at 6 years old, but I got used to it quickly and did it 5 days a week for almost 3 years. And rain or shine or heat or cold I was walking alone thru the woods to school. No bullies in there. Just a few birds and squirrels up in the trees.

This school building no longer exist it was torn down years ago the students in that area now ride school buses to a newer more modern school. I was in the third grade at Hammond Elementary in Sandy Springs, when I started school there, and our school up in Cherokee County was about 3—4. months ahead of the achievement status of this school. And most of this I had already learned. This is where I soon learned about. Bullies I had never had a fight, in school and I didn’t understand how to defend myself or fight back. In my school up in Cherokee County I had never heard of anyone fighting, we didn’t do that there, or even think about fighting .. I got beat up almost every afternoon on the walk home from school in Sandy Springs, it was awful, My brother Troy walked home with me, after he was in the first grade, the bully’s didn’t pick on him he was just