The Early Years, 1941–1947

In order to set the stage for the lifestyle changes that took place in 1947, I would like to give a little history of the family. The history of any family, I believe, has a lot to do with the mind-set and environment of the children born into that family.

My dad was born in 1898 near Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and was a veteran of World War I. He was a victim of mustard gas, causing him lung problems for the rest of his life. If there is such a thing as having too much pride, he was a perfect example. Although he had a certificate of wounded in action, he would not take any assistance from the government as long as he could work and make enough to provide for his family. He fathered ten children, two of which met early deaths due to childhood diseases. The other eight, none of which had physical or mental illness or deformities, finished high school. He was a carpenter and a very religious man who raised a family under strict rules. The cold rough winters, along with health problems, caused Dad to make the decision that would make drastic changes in the lifestyles of the entire family.

Mother was born in the mountains of West Virginia, near Hinton. Mother and Dad both came from large families, and by the time I came along, they had settled in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Mom was a homemaker, and she had a good head on her shoulders about managing assets.

On June 7, 1941, I was born as the youngest of eight living children in a house on Putnam Street in Parkersburg.

As history tells us, not long after my birth, World War II broke out and changed the lives of most people in this country. Two brothers-in-law and my oldest brother Edward went to war, along with the rest of the men and women who paid the price for freedom in the United States.

My childhood from birth until about five years old is not something I remember a lot about. I do remember, however, the day Ed came home from the navy after the war.

As time has passed, I have written several songs and included the words of two of them in this book: "Dad Was the Head of Our Home" and "Mama Found a Dollar."

The Old Farmhouse

The first recollection I have of the farm was the old farmhouse. We arrived in the town of Monroe, where we stopped at the only hotel, which was in an old building in the main part of town. We had been on the road for several hours traveling from Parkersburg, West Virginia, through the mountains by the way that was before interstates or even the West Virginia Turnpike. Needless to say, everybody was beat after the two days of travel, but because none of us had seen our new home, we decided to drive out and take a quick look around.

When we arrived, the moving van was there sitting in front of the house. To the older men, it seemed the thing to do would be to unload while they were all there and not wait until morning. It would make sense that the driver would want to head back to West Virginia as soon as he could, so that is what they did. This turned out to be a rather large task with no electricity or running water in the house. The truck driver had a helper, a big black man who was apparently superstitious. He broke a mirror and went on and on about how seven years of bad luck would follow such an action. I can't recall ever seeing him after that so I can't say much about the bad luck it might have caused.

It is hard to tell you just what we saw. The driveway was not really a driveway. It was more like a yard with no grass that had washed away several times and left ditches in the dirt. The old house was a one-story farmhouse that appeared to have been abandoned for some time. It was covered with unpainted wooden German siding. The house looked more like an old sharecropper's house than anything else. Of course, most of us had never seen anything like it before.

The home we left in Parkersburg was a two-story frame house in good shape with a basement, electricity, natural gas, heat, and running water, and it was in town with paved streets and concrete curbs along the sidewalk. What had we done! At five years of age, I was just along for the ride, but Mom was rather disappointed to say the least. While the men unloaded the moving truck, we sat in the car because it was a cool, rainy night and there was nowhere else to go. It seemed like a long time, but we finally headed to the hotel, which was about five miles from the farm. We spent the night, and everybody was glad to get a bath and a night's sleep.

The next day, we returned to the farm and got our first look in the daylight. I will have to say again that it is hard to put into words what the place looked like. The house was sitting on rock pillars with no underpinning. The yard had no grass, and it was not what you could call a pretty sight. Nevertheless, we were here, and it was going to be our new home. The house was sitting there with some post oak trees around it, two well shelters, a grain building that seemed to be in better shape than the house, and a barn with a hayloft. The road in front was dirt with very little gravel on it. The well covers were there to keep the rain off when drawing water. One was a dug well about twenty-five feet deep, which was mostly surface water, and the other was a drilled well that gave a limited supply of mineral water. It wasn't the best-tasting water around, but it was wet and cold. Neither well had a pump, so all water had to be drawn by hand.

As I said, the house had no underpinning. Neither did it have insulation in the walls or overhead. The floor from the kitchen to the living room had about a ten- to twenty-degree slope, which was good for anything with wheels to coast. To remedy this, Dad and my brother Don went to the woods and cut down a tree. And with an ax, they hewed out a log that would reach from the back wall through the kitchen and dining room, placed it under the house, and leveled the floor with jacks.

Dad was a carpenter and could see the potential of the old house, but not everyone had the same insight or imagination. The floors were made of wood planks with some rather wide cracks between them. We laughed about seeing the chickens under the house without having to go outside, but it was no joke. As Dad fixed the house, he put linoleum on the floor, and when the wind would blow, the floor would raise up two or three inches. Linoleum was like vinyl and came twelve feet wide and cut to the length of a room. The source of heat was a warm morning stove in the living room and a small stove in the kitchen. We had an LP gas cook stove in the kitchen, but bottled gas was rather expensive, so we surely could not use it for heat. Speaking of gas, we also had a gas-operated refrigerator, and as a boy, it was a mystery to me how you could have a fire down below and ice up above. After understanding how refrigeration worked, it was simple, but not for a kid my age.

Living in a cold house was certainly a challenge. We all had so many covers on at night that you could hardly turn over. The window ice was sometimes a quarter-inch thick, and you mostly hoped that you wouldn't have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night during the winter. When we moved in, we only had a fireplace, and everybody laughed about all the sardine cans that came out of it when we got there.

All things considered, all the drawbacks of the old way of life weren't too bad after all. I will have to admit that remembering it is not near as painful as living it was.

The Cotton Patch

If you have never had to plant, chop, and pick cotton, you have no idea of what can and does happen in the cotton patch. Our main source of machinery was drawn by a horse named Nellie. The next source of energy was family members and hand tools, mainly a hoe and shovel. We were not the only farmers without the needed machinery so we really didn't let it affect us adversely, and we went on to raise a crop the old, slow, hard way.

The long days in a cotton field afforded everyone the opportunity to communicate with each other on a full range of subjects. It also allowed us to have a good suntan, sore knees and hands, tired backs, and the need for a good night's sleep at the end of the day. Dad was an old-time farmer type and was at no time going to allow any grass in the cotton field. His determination was so strong that he walked the fields on Sunday afternoon to decide which area we would start on Monday.

The planting was quite different from the processes used today, as in the early years was done with a one-horse planter and fertilizer distributor. The neighborly thing to do then was for the joining farmers to gather at the field of a farmer and all help with the planting. It was only a short time before the cotton plants were up, along with the hot sun, the best ingredient needed for rapid growth of the cotton crop. As a rule, we kids wore only short pants and a straw hat when chopping time came. We did have a few things to look out for, one being the copperhead snake, which were common in our area.

The days were long as we were in the field as soon as the morning chores were done, such as feeding the animals, and we worked until sundown or the field we were working on was clean of all growing plants other than cotton. We were a farm family and didn't question the amount of time involved in keeping everything moving, just as the farmers of today spend endless days repairing, planting, and harvesting the crops.

After a few years, Dad was able to buy a tractor (Farmall Cub), so now the work could go on after dark as the tractor had headlights on it. The tractor came with a turn plow and cultivators, but most of the other tools had to be converted from horse-drawn to fit the lifts on the tractor. Dad was good at making everything work and had all the horse equipment converted for use on the tractor in short order.

Many things come to mind as I recall those days in the cotton field, like the unmistakable smell of the quart canning jar full of drinking water we kept under the corner of the cotton sheet. Although it was not cool under the cotton sheet, being shaded from the hot sun allowed the water to be slightly cooler than the air. The smell, I am sure, was created in part by whatever had been canned in the quart jar, the sealing rubber around the zinc lid, and the time spent there under the sheet. There is no way to describe that smell, but what I would give to raise that jar to take a drink and recapture that again. This might make you think I am crazy.

I remember those mornings when the dew was heavy and we had to wait until it dried up a little so we could pick. For one thing, the extra weight cost the farmer more to harvest because the pickers were paid by the pound. Also, the moisture would cause the cotton to mildew while waiting for enough to be picked to take to the gin.

One of the unpleasant memories was the worms. Yes, worms. They were called pack saddles, and they were covered with stingers so that, no matter where you touched them, you got quite a sting, which was somewhat painful and needed some attention. It was a good thing if someone in the field was chewing tobacco, as tobacco juice was one of the things that would reduce the pain and slow the swelling.

We also watched out for the stinging worm, which had stingers in the front and back. The front stinger looked like a horn. Both these worms were green and sometimes hard to detect on the green cotton leaves. The tobacco remedy was good for this sting as well. Most of the time when we chopped the cotton, it was very hot, causing discomfort to the feet as we were barefoot most of the time. When it got too hot, we would take a hoe, drag it through the dirt, and step on the freshly cultivated soil to cool our feet.

Then there were the cotton boll fights we got into when picking. Of course, Dad didn't like that part of our horseplay and complained that every boll we threw was a loss of the harvest. As I pass by the cotton fields in Alabama and Tennessee today and see all of the waste due to the method of picking, I can't help but remember how we made sure we gathered every boll with no tags left in the field. A tag was a small amount of cotton that didn't come out of the burr easily and stayed behind. The idea was to look across the field that had been picked and see no white. A job well done was and still is a characteristic of any job done by hand. Of course, nobody picks cotton by hand anymore.

In North Carolina, our method of harvest was somewhat different than cotton growers in other areas. We used what we called tow sacks, or gunny sacks with a strap over our shoulder. We picked every boll of cotton, placed it in the sack, and pulled it along behind us until it was full. When the sack was full, we took it to an area in the field where we emptied it on what we called a cotton sheet made of four gunny sacks sewed together. Each person had his or her own cotton sheet so you could weigh your entire day's picking in the evening. My mother told the story about me at the age of five when we started picking cotton.

I said, "We don't have to do this, do we?"

My dad replied, "Those who don't pick cotton don't eat."

I said, "We don't eat this stuff, do we?"

We picked and emptied our sacks onto this sheet all day. At the end of the day, we tied the corners together and weighed up the sheet to see the total of our accomplishment for the day.

The average pay for picking cotton was about three dollars per hundred pounds, and the amount of a day's work could range from 100 to 350 pounds, depending on how fast you picked. Sometimes it had to do with how much talking went on in the field. Most of the time, that was controlled by the adults picking alongside you. When the sheets were weighed, they were carried to a room in one of the farm buildings to be protected from the weather. They were emptied, and the cotton was held there until enough was picked to make a bale of ginned cotton that would weigh about five hundred pounds after it was baled.

When enough loose cotton was collected, it would be loaded by hand into a wagon or trailer and then hauled to the gin. The ginning process was an experience in itself. A ten- to twelve-inch telescoping pipe was pulled down into the wagon or trailer, and the loose cotton was vacuumed up through the pipe into the gin. The gin removed the seeds from the cotton. Then it was dried and baled. The cotton was then loaded back on the wagon to be taken back to the farm and held until sale time. As a young boy, it was very exciting time when you were allowed to operate the big vacuum tube at the gin.

So what was done with the seed from the ginned cotton? Cotton seed was used for a lot of things, one being ground into a meal and fed to livestock. Real money during this time was not very prevalent, and sometimes the seeds were traded to the gin operator to pay the ginning fees. Some farmers kept seed for the next year's planting. These are some of the memories I have of a young man on the cotton farm in North Carolina.

A daily wage for helping another farmer was three dollars per day. Of course, no pay was expected for working on your own farm.

The Corn Patch

Corn was one of the crops we raised, and again, our equipment was limited to the small tractor and trailer. We gathered the corn by hand one ear a time and hauled it to the building we called the granary. It was kept until we used it as feed for the livestock or taken to the hammer mill.

After gathering the ears, the stalks were cut down, and they would be used as cow feed. This is what was known as fodder. Fodder was sometimes left in the field until it was time to feed it, and it was stacked together in stacks, and it was called a corn shock. Shocks were made by using a shock horse made from two-by-fours, and corn stalks were stacked around it. Fodder was also used by taking it to the hammer mill and grinding it up and mixing it with other feed as bulk. Corn was also used for chicken feed after being run through the hammer mill. This feed was called cracked corn, and it was good for the laying hens as well as fat builders.