The War Years - November 21, 2013

As published in the White River Current - Thursday November 21, 2013

It was one of those “where were you” events that you never forget. It was a mild, December Sunday afternoon. My granddad and I were out in the front yard with our baseball gloves, playing “catch” when dad came out on the porch and called us inside. Our Philco radio was turned up loud and I could hear the announcer talking about the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor. I had no idea where Pearl Harbor was or the significance of this attack until the next day. It was the main topic of conversation in every classroom. Some of the older boys dropped out of school and enlisted in the army or navy. The president of the United States called the attack an act that would “live in infamy.” Well, I didn’t know what infamy was but I was pretty sure that it meant it was pretty bad. I finally looked it up in the dictionary (it means extremely bad; wicked). The Congress declared war on both the Japanese and Germans. Our school superintendent was of German ancestry. We young boys were convinced he was a spy. Occasionally someone would see the lights were on in his second story school office and we were certain he was up there sending radio messages to the enemy. What imagination. Things settled down and got back to a degree of normal in a few days. A rationing program began on several items such as gasoline and some food items. I believe sugar and coffee were a couple of these but I wasn’t involved in the buying of our necessities. I do know that there were kinds of stamps that were required when you purchased certain items. The Calico Rock Museum has some of these stamps on display. Check it out. We continued our family life much the same with raising most of our food and applying an old adage that my mother used to quote: “Eat what you can and what you can’t (eat), you can.” As I have stated before, mom had a canner on the stove six days a week. She also made butter and had a regular list of customers. Her butter was pressed into a round, wooden mold that would leave a raised imprint of a leaf on the top when it was turned out. She wrapped the butter in waxed paper and sold it for forty cents. I wish I had that butter mold now but maybe it is in a museum somewhere. Anyway, as in all wars, some of Calico Rock’s finest did not return and many others returned with the scars of battlefield encounters. I happened to be down on Main Street when my uncle Elbert received the telegram that his son, my cousin William Reed, was missing in action. Several weeks later, another telegram came that notified the family that Reed was a POW in Germany. He was a tail gunner on a B-17 bomber that was shot down over Germany, A few years ago, at the Oshkosh, WI, air show, I toured the inside of a B-17 that was on display. I always thought they were really large planes but, actually, they were pretty small, comparatively speaking. I’m still amazed at how tight a space there was for the tail gunner. A miracle that he was able to get loose and bail out. I think he was in POW camp about eighteen months or so until the war ended and he was able to return home. A real hero as are all who put themselves in harm’s way to protect our freedom. My dad served on the draft board for a time during the war years. I know the anguish he had when one of the boys he sent off to war never returned. What a burden. About ten years later, I was drafted into the army to help in the Korean conflict (it was never referred to as a war). I might talk a little about that in an article soon. Anyway, the war with Germany ended in May, 1945, and with Japan about three months later. When word reached Calico Rock that the war with Germany was over, school was dismissed and we all headed downtown to join the celebration. Two of us climbed up the bell tower on the church and rang the bell for an hour. Everyone was so happy. I want to back up and write about an incident that occurred during the war, probably the summer of 1944. That will have to wait until next time, in two weeks. See you then.

Hard Times No 4 - November 7, 2013

As published in the White River Current - Thursday November 7, 2013

Continuing the saga of life at the Rock House on Red Lane in the depression years. Our family quickly developed a routine that we followed for the seven or so years that we resided in the Rock House. Every morning, after granddad had built a fire in the wood cookstove, mother would begin cooking breakfast. When the water in the teakettle was hot, she would fill a cup with hot water and place it on top of the warming closet of the stove. Granddad would have finished milking our Guernsey cow and would bring the two gallon bucket of fresh milk into the kitchen where it was strained through cheese cloth and placed in a cool place for the cream to rise. The cream was skimmed off and later churned to make butter. We drank the skimmed milk at mealtime, referring to it as “blue john.” Granddad would drink his cup of hot water and wait for the breakfast meal which always consisted of hot biscuits. We bought flour in 25 pound cloth sacks. The empty sacks were used for various purposes, such as dish cloths, sewn into small bags for freshly ground sausage on butchering day, and quite often used to make shirts and other articles of clothing. Granddad always ate oatmeal every morning. Funny but I could eat oatmeal every morning now but I wasn’t very fond of it then, much to the chagrin of granddad. After breakfast, Janice and I would be off to school. The two-story school building housed all twelve grades. There also were schools at Creswell, Boswell, Pineville and 25 other locations in Izard County. I believe the first consolidation of the schools took place in 1939 which was the same year that Izard became a “dry county” but I imagine that is strictly a coincidence. After my sister and I got home from school, I took care of the chores that were assigned to me, did my homework, ate supper and usually went to bed early. Included in the list of my daily chores was feeding the chickens and gathering the eggs, slopping the hogs, emptying the chamber pots, splitting wood for the kitchen stove (also splitting kindling). About this time every year, after the first frost of the season, my dad would get home from work in time to eat supper with the rest of us, after which we would have a family conference. Now, I know it wasn’t exactly like that, but, looking back, it seems like it was. One of the items of business was to check the almanac and select a time to butcher the hog that we had been fattening up. This was earmarked, but we agreed to start the necessary preparations and wait for that cold, frosty morning. Susan had a “Not So Long Ago” column in this newspaper several months ago that gave all you would want to know about Hog Killin.’ You might check with the archives and find this two column story that was written by a former resident. Anyway, we finally got to the main topic of our family conference which was: Who are we going to buy our molasses from this year? My dad would lean back and say, in an expert tone, “Well, I heard that Vessie Scott has the best this year.” So, it was settled and we all went to bed. We always bought several gallons of molasses every year. We had that thick, sugary liquid on our table at every meal. The comedian, Jerry Clower, had a funny routine about the amount of butter you would stir into your plate of molasses. He quoted his mom as saying “now you be sure and lick that knife before you put it back in the butter.” Probably a misquote, but you get the idea. We didn’t have a lot, but we never went hungry. We had a big garden and mother had a canner on the stove six days a week during the summer. I had a few added chores in the summer, shelling peas, churning the butter, etc. Life was good. Then one Sunday, December 7, 1941, everything changed. Our country was at war.

Hard Times 3 - October 23, 2013

As published in the White River Current - Thursday October 23, 2013

Continuing the saga of the Hard Times depression years of the thirties and early forties: The move to the Rock House at the foot of Red Lane was not without trauma. When we arrived with a load of our possessions, the first things we noticed were three large feed sacks in the front yard. Upon further examination, we discovered that the sacks were all full of empty liquor bottles that had been picked up out of the field next to our house. We later found out that the bottles had been tossed out into the field by the previous renter. Of course, I was not too happy moving away from my friends on First Street. This only lasted a day or two and we got settled into what became a seven+ year stay. The Rock House had three bedrooms. My sister, Janice, was awarded the larger front bedroom, my parents chose the back bedroom and my granddad and I slept in the small middle bedroom on a feather bed. Let me pause here and tell you about my granddad. He was the only living grandparent that I ever had. His name was Lucas and everyone but me called him “Uncle Luke.” He was my mother’s father who lived with us until he died at the age of 69 (I was 13). He was a great help to my mother and did most of the outside work because my dad left for work very early and did not get home until after dark most of the time. Arising before daylight, granddad would build a fire in the wood heating stove that was located in the living room (our primary source of heat during the winter months), then build a fire in the wood cookstove and then it was off to the barn to slop the hogs and milk our cow. When he came back to the house with the large galvanized bucket of fresh milk, my mother would have started cooking breakfast. We bought flour in large sacks, twenty-five pounds I think, and mother made biscuits every morning. Quite often she took a portion of the biscuit dough and make a small fried pie for my lunch (I liked cherry the best). Beside the pie, she made a sandwich of potted meat salad (a small can of potted meat, a chopped boiled egg and a little mayonnaise) spread between two slices of light bread, all wrapped in waxed paper and placed in a small brown paper sack. Yummie!! I had the best lunch of anyone in the first grade. My mom, with the help of my granddad, took good care of her little boy. After breakfast, my sister and I were off to school; we walked. Granddad and I were buddies and I really missed him when he was gone. He was really good to me and never seemed to tire playing baseball with me (he was always the pitcher, I was always the batter.) My mom also had a brother and two sisters who came the long distance from their homes for an occasional visit. One of the sisters was diagnosed with TB and spent almost a year at the sanatorium in Booneville. Her youngest daughter, who was three years old at the time, stayed with us during this period. I was assigned the task of keeping her occupied because she missed her mom. We played games and her favorite was the toy tea set that we used a lot. I drank a lot of make-believe tea during that time. Oh, I almost forgot about the rock house. Anyway, in addition to the bedrooms, the house had a living room (where the heating stove was), a dining room with a large, round, claw-footed dining table and six chairs and a kitchen with a wood burning cook stove. We were the last house on the highway to have electricity. We did not have indoor plumbing but had a two-holer outhouse. We did have a well. A wash stand that held a metal pan, water bucket and dipper were located just outside the back door. Baths were taken in a #2 galvanized wash tub. A few feet from the back door was a large kettle that my mother used to make lye soap and hominy (not at the same time.) Our house was built with cobble stones, a rough-textured material that was also used in constructing a rock fence that bordered the yard on two sides. A one-car garage was located on the north corner of the property. Also on our property was a smoke house where we kept our cured meat, a chicken house (eggs and fryers) and a small barn for our Guernsey milk cow. We had a large garden spot. I’m sure this is boring so I will pause and endeavor to describe growing up in the depression years in the next episode. See you in two weeks. Bye for now.

Hard Times No. 2 - October 11, 2013

As published in the White River Current - Thursday October 11, 2013 “Hey, Bill. Did you hear that John broke his leg this morning?” “No, I hadn’t heard that. How did it happen?” “Well, he fell out of the persimmon tree while he was eating breakfast.” I don’t know whether I should call this a humorous tale or not but I heard it repeated many times back in the depression years of the “thirties.” I had several comments on my last article about “Hard Times” so I thought I might continue with more stories about my early years. Some of this I may have written about before. Anyway, I was born in Calico Rock in the early thirties, in the small house across the street from the present library/city hall. In small towns (and sometime in larger towns), houses have names referring to present or past residents. Examples of this are the Mixon house or the Judge Hammett house. Anyway, I was born in the Copp house. When I was about six months old, we moved to a two-story frame house at the top of the hill on West First Street known as the Dr. Matthews house. This house was next door (West) to the Dr. Smith house and we lived there about a year then moved to the William Wayland house, a large two-store yellow house that was located on the corner of what is now Park Street and Highway 56. Hold your place here while I explain that in 1969 I purchased this house from the owners, Frank and Verneice, and moved my drug store from Main Street into a new building that I had built after moving the house (which Frank had converted to a single story home) to a location in East Calico Rock. OK, after a year or so in the Wayland house, we moved back to West First Street into a house that was next door and East of the Dr. Smith house. I remember a lot about this house. This was close to downtown and the railroad and we had hobos quite often come to the back door and ask for food. I mentioned this in the last article. I have heard that the hobos had a system of notifying other hungry travelers who were riding the rails about where they could get something to eat. There were several young children, about my age who lived nearby so I had a lot of playmates. The Marchants lived across the street and their youngest son, Wade, was closest to my age so we played together along with Max and Billy Charles. Very early every morning, Mr. Marchant could be seen leading his milk cow down the hill and over to the Rand pasture where she would graze until late afternoon when he would bring her back to the house to milk, an everyday routine. He worked long days as part of the section gang on the railroad, replacing old crossties and otherwise keeping the trains safely moving to their destination. Joe was a part of the citizenry of our country referred to as the “common people” but are anything but common. I prefer to call them the “Salt of the Earth.” Hard Times. During the day, Wade sometime would visit and sit on the front porch with his elderly neighbor, Aunt Sally. Their conversation might go like this: Someone would occasionally drive or walk down the street in front of the house and Aunt Sally would lean forward in her rocking chair and say “Well, who are we?” Wade, in the other rocking chair, would answer “Well, you’re Sally and I’m Wade.” Believe me, this was funny, so maybe you can conjure up a mental picture of it. I wrote about the Hagars in a previous article. To refresh your memory, the youngest daughter, Johnnie Fay, was about my age. We spent many hours sitting on the floor in front of her mother while she taught us our ABCs and numbers. I could read and do some simple math when I entered the first grade. Sometime the girls and boys would gather in our yard and play games such as tag, annie over, drop the handkerchief and “ring around the rosie.” If these were hard times, we kids didn’t know it. Great memories of our house on West First Street but after a couple of years, we moved to the rock house on Red Lane. I was five years old. We’ll continue the saga when I see you in two weeks. Bye for now!

Hard Times - September 26, 2013

As published in the White River Current - Thursday September 26, 2013 So you think you have it rough, do you? You don’t even know the meaning of rough. Why, when I was a boy, I had to walk five miles to and from school, uphill both ways, barefoot, in eight inches of snow. OK, I’m exaggerating a little. It was only four inches of snow. I know most of you have already heard this story or variations of it. The point is, things are a lot different now than they were “back when I was growing up.” I was reminded of this a few weeks ago when I attended an evening performance at the Ozark Folk Center. A very talented group sang an acapella rendition of an old Stephen Foster song entitled “Hard Times Come Again No More.” The verse of the song goes like this “Let us pause in life’s pleasures and count it’s many tears While we all sup sorrow with the poor. While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay, there are frail forms fainting at the door.” You can imagine the mournful music that goes with these powerful lyrics. You might also check out the version sung by Nanci Griffith on YouTube. The composer of this song, Stephen Collins Foster, is known as the “father of American music.” He wrote over 200 songs. Among his best known are “Oh! Susanna”, “Camptown Races”, “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” and “Beautiful Dreamer”. Two of his compositions have become official state songs: “My Old Kentucky Home” (State of Kentucky, 1928) and “Old Folks at Home” (Florida, 1935). Many of his compositions remain popular more than 150 years after he wrote them. Stephen died in 1864 at the age of 37. I grew up during the depression years of the ‘30s. I imagine those years were “hard times” for many families but you have to define what “hard times” and “poor” really mean. Our family consisted of my mom and dad, my grandfather and my sister and I. My dad had a regular job where he worked ten or twelve hours a day, six days a week. We lived pretty frugally but I never thought of us being poor. In today’s society, poor is determined by the federal government by the poverty level which is a combination of income, number of dependents and other things. Many people who are classified as poor today would have been thought of as rich back in the depression days. Even so, we didn’t think of it as hard times because we didn’t know any better. Our doors were never locked. We had respect for one another. I remember hobos coming to our back door asking for food. My mother always had something for them, usually a sandwich and maybe an apple. We moved a total of seven times by the time I was fifteen years old, the last house being the only one my parents owned, the others being rent houses. Seven of the fifteen years were spent at the rock house on Red Lane that I have written about in previous articles. I lived there from age five to twelve. None of the seven houses had indoor plumbing until my dad added a bathroom onto the seventh house. I was a junior in college at the time. When we lived in the rock house we were the last house on the road that had electricity. We kept the kerosene lamp handy because the lights were off a lot of the time. We were on a telephone party line with two or three other families. Our number was 29F4. That means it was number 29 and our ring was four “longs”. For me, Spring was when I changed from the long johns to more suitable under garments for the warmer weather. Summer was when I could go barefoot. The only time I wore shoes was on Sunday for church. Overalls was my usual attire. In a future article, I want to write about my playmates and the games we played. Things are much different now than they were “back then.” I won’t go so far as to say they were the good old days but we made do with what we had. I really don’t have any bad memories of those days. Yes, things are different now. The other day, a lady told me about her daughter almost going ballistic as they were driving away from their home and she remembered she had forgotten her cell phone. Of course, they had to return home and retrieve it. Contrast that to the telephones in my early years. More on this subject coming soon. Bye, bye for now.

Food - September 5, 2013

Food: As published in the White River Current - Thursday September 5, 2013 I enjoy eating. I didn’t have to tell you that. It is quite evident by the shape of my body that I like food, and plenty of it. Of course, same as you, there are some things that I like better than others, but there are very few things that I absolutely do not like. I like most vegetables such as celery, Brussels sprouts and eggplant. Now, I have never been on a cruise and you may think that is unusual. The real reason is that I have a tendency to overeat and when I do I often come down with an attack of gastritis which could last for several days. Everyone that I have heard comment on a cruise vacation always raves about the amount and variety of foods that are available for consumption at their will and pleasure. For example, Robert and Sharon went on a Scandinavian trip a few months ago. He told me that he ate three lobsters every night they were aboard the ship. Now I enjoy seafood but I can tell you for sure that if I had made it through three lobsters I would spend the rest of the cruise in sickbay. Anyway, this idea about food came across my brain when I was writing the last column which was about the “last days” if you remember. A crazy thought came to me. If I had the opportunity to choose my last meal, what would it consist of? After much consideration, here it is: For an appetizer, a half dozen oysters on the half shell; for the salad, lime Jello with pear halves; for soup, a cup of homemade vegetarian vegetable. You might be with me up to now but let’s go to the main course: a slice of fried salt pork with stewed potatoes, whippoorwill peas, turnip greens, a few whole pickled beets, a thick slice of a white onion and a large slab of yellow cornbread (you could add or substitute for the salt pork a big dish of kraut and wieners). The dessert choice is easy: Apple pie with a huge dip of butter pecan ice cream and drizzled with warm caramel syrup. No doubt about it, if I ate all that it would be my last meal. Now I feel pretty confident in saying not many of you would make the same choices that I did. I guess my desires are influenced a lot by the meals I had when I was growing up. Well, you can delete the oysters from that list because I don’t believe they ever appeared on our dining table. Lately there have been a lot of recipes that show up on Facebook that look interesting and I have been thinking about trying some of them. I’m not much of a cook but I scramble the eggs at the men’s breakfasts at church sometime if that counts as cooking. Now my neighbor, Tom*, is a gourmet cook in addition to his many other talents. In one of his recent emails he detailed a recent kitchen episode. (I must have deleted his email by mistake so I will have to pass it on as I remember it, so here it is). “My wife was out of town so I decided to make a run up to Harp’s to get something for lunch. I was delighted to see that they had just received a shipment of Ruby-throated hummingbird tongues and, since they are the best, I bought two packages. I sautéed both packages in a half cup of extra virgin olive oil that I had pressed from fruit that I had harvested the day before. When the tongues began to curl, I removed the pan and drained most of the oil. Returning the pan to medium heat, I stirred in a cup of heavy cream. When the mixture began to thicken, I added a half teaspoon of sea salt and a few turns of freshly ground black pepper and spooned the entire dish onto a thick slice of wheat toast. Yummie!!” Well, as you can see, our tastes differ somewhat. I prefer the Rufous hummingbird species. Their tongues are a little longer.. (Permission is granted to call this a “tongue-in-cheek” article). Welcome back, Tom* and Fredericka. We have missed you. Tom* will be here with his column for the next two weeks. I’ll see you in three weeks. Bye for now.

Journal - August 29, 2013

Journal - As published in the White River Current - Thursday August 29, 2013 We spend our years as a tale that is told. This verse of scripture from the Old Testament book of Psalms (90:9b, KJV) has long intrigued me. Every life is different and everyone has a story of their own to tell. My great grandmother kept a journal for twenty years, from 1890 to 1910. I have a copy, thanks to the effort of my mother in preserving this document. My sister had a diary that she wrote in every day and kept hidden in her chest of drawers. I knew about it and, after a search, found it and was reading some of the juicy entries when my mother caught me and gave me a good paddling. More recently, when I have remarked to Steve about something that occurred several years ago, he would say to me “write that down.” I wish that I had honored that request more diligently. It would be great if everyone kept a record of their life. Some of the entries in my great GM’s journal are very brief (about the weather, etc.) while others are somewhat humorous. Births are recorded (my mother in 1901) and deaths (her husband, who she called Mr. Mac, and she says “what will be do, what will we do?). Those were difficult days but we know about them because of my GGM. Her name was Tabitha, but everyone called her “Aunt T.” The title of “uncle” or “aunt” was still very common even when I was growing up. It was applied to older adults quite often even though some of them were only in their fifties. My granddad’s name was Lucas, but to everyone else he was “Uncle Luke.” Other community residents were Aunt Lou, Aunt Sally, Uncle Lynn and Uncle Ed (actually my real uncle but everyone called him “Uncle”) to name a few. Sorry, I’m getting away from the subject matter, but, hey!! This is what I do. I ramble. Back to the scripture verse at the top. The part about spending our years as a tale that is told is only found in the King James Version of the Bible (if I am wrong, please let me know.) This psalm, which is attributed to Moses, is actually a prayer. It is widely used at funerals as part of the scripture text. Now I don’t want to get morbid here, but we might as well face it. It’s coming, someday, to every one of us. You know. The big “D”. As certain as taxes, the saying goes. In the past, when I was more active, I was called on to play the piano or organ for funeral services at various churches and funeral home chapels in Calico Rock and other cities. I wish I had kept a record (journal) and these probably would amount to several hundred services, on some occasions three or four times a week. I admit that I became somewhat desensitized to the situations but now, in my old age, I think about it a lot. Several columns back, I wrote a little piece about “September Song.” One of the verses refers to the days dwindling down to a “precious few.” Another way of putting it is that when we get old, like me, we are close to the “last chapter” of our journal. How will it all end? We aren’t sure but I had a friend that told me he would like to live to be 110 years and be shot by a jealous husband. I assured him that wouldn’t happen. Oh, he might live to be 110, but forget the jealous husband part. However, when the final curtain falls, I would like to be as ready as possible. I’m giving some thought about my funeral service. I have some music selected, some pallbearers picked out and I want the minister to use Psalm 90 as the text for his eulogy. Most people would rather not discuss these things, so if I have offended anyone, I apologize. I’ll be more upbeat when I see you in two weeks when the topic will be “food.” Bye for now.