As published in the White River Current - February 13, 2014
Only
twenty six more days ‘til Spring so I had better get on with my saga of life in
the Rock House on Red Lane during the depression and war years. I want to concentrate on two families in
particular: The Langstons and the
Hudsons. Sidney Langston’s family was our
closest neighbor. He had an older
sister, Wilma, who was in my sister’s high school class, a younger sister
(Ruby) and a younger brother (Jackie).
Sid had joined our church and was in my Sunday School class. He was a year or so older than I and we were
close friends. Sidney was crippled. When he was younger he severely injured his
left knee in a running accident and a botched-up job of knee repair left him
with a permanently stiff leg that was a
couple of inches shorter than the other leg causing him to have a very
pronounced limp. One Sunday, Sidney
asked me if I would like to come over to their house the next day and help him
“chop” cotton. I accepted the invitation
and next morning my mother fixed me a short-handled hoe and I walked across the
field to the Langston house to begin a new adventure. I expect I was about 8 years old at the time
and knew absolutely nothing about cotton farming. I soon learned how to thin out the small
cotton seedlings so that the other plants would have more room to grow and,
hopefully, produce a good crop. Cotton
was the primary cash crop for Izard County farmers in those days and it was a
main source of income for the Langston family.
Crop rotation, terracing and other methods of land control were unknown
then and the land was literally farmed to death with most of the top soil
washing away leaving the poor hill land we have today. I guess my help was appreciated because I was
invited to stay for dinner (lunch). The
only thing I remember about the meal was the “clabbered” milk that the family drank but I chose water
which came from their cistern and had a bit of a “whang” but wasn’t too bad. A small patch of peanuts had been planted
near the house. I remember one occasion
that Sidney and I pulled and shelled a few of these edible pods which his
mother (Flora) parched in a small fry pan.
Once Sidney and I decided that we were old enough to smoke. We started smoking grapevines at first then
moved on to rabbit tobacco. Neither of
these proved very enjoyable and we soon gave it up. In my previous column, I mentioned that I
smoked cigarettes for a short period as a young adult. The following incident occurred when I was in
the army, helping to win the Korean conflict (it was never called a “war”): I was at my post in the hospital laboratory, peering
through a microscope, doing blood counts, when I noticed that I had three lit
cigarettes in the ash tray on my desk (yes, we smoked inside the hospital
then). I was not aware when I had lit
the smokes. I took this as a “sign” and
quit cold-turkey right then. Anyway,
back to the Langstons. The family did
not own an automobile but had a team of horses that were used to pull the
steel-tired wagon that was their mode of transportation. The horses were also used, of course, in the
farming operation and many times I walked across the field late in the
afternoon to meet Sidney and ride the horses to the upper pasture I
spent many enjoyable hours with this family.
Ruby, the only survivor, still resides in the Calico Rock area. The Hudson family, Ulys, Bessie and their
six children, lived about a half mile up the highway near the “fork in the
road.” They were members of our church
and it was very rare then they were not in attendance. It was often said that if the church doors
were open, the Perrymans and Hudsons were there (I think I noted this in an
earlier article). The children, by age,
were two boys and a girl, two boys and a girl.
The older girl was in my sister’s high school class. I was pretty close to the younger boys
(Charles and Dean) and we had many playful adventures together. They were on the telephone party line with my
folks but did not have electricity. Our
house was at the end of the electric lines until some years later. I’ll continue my story about growing up with
the Hudsons in a couple of weeks. Bye
for now.
