J.C.’s Story

(Note: The following is a transcription of a series of audio tapes my father, Joseph Caroll “J.C.” VanHook made in 1998 of his early life)

My name is Joseph Carroll VanHook, and I was born on October 12, 1920, in Boyle County, Kentucky.  I was born at the Cobb place between Danville and Stanford near Hanging Fork Creek, where we were living at the time.  My father is Oscar Ralston VanHook, whom we called Poppy, and my mother Esther Sonora Price.  I was the seventh of ten children.

When I was born in 1920, Poppy had to have an operation in Danville for an ulcer.  From that time, until he died in 1943, he was never completely well again.  He worked hard, but was always thin.  He had to stay on a strict diet of easy to digest foods, like mashed potatoes and poached eggs.  Many times he could not keep his lunch down, and would get down off the hay baler or cutting harrow and have to throw up.  You could tell he wasn't healthy by looking at him, but he never gave up.  He never complained, and he was always the head of the family and made the decisions.

Poppy was never very big, he probably never weighed more than 150 pounds.  He weighed much less than that after he became sick.  He had a calm temperament, and the only time I remember hearing him curse was when he was kicked by a cow.  He never drank, he never abused his children.  All his children looked up to him and respected him.  He taught by example.

Poppy was a farmer.  He would lease a farm and raise crops to eat and to sell.  He would raise all sorts of livestock.  We always rented land, so we moved many times, often in December as the farm would be available starting the first of a year.

***

I was between one and two years old when we moved from the Cobb place to Hustonville, in Lincoln County.  Mom was cleaning up the new place and using lye soap to clean the floors.  I was very little and I got some of that lye and ate it.  They took me to Dr. O'Bannon in Stanford and he put a rubber tube down my throat to keep it open.  Every so often they would take me back to the doctor and he would put the tube down my throat again.  Every time I would see the doctor, I would get scared and cry and throw fits.

1923 to 1927

One of my earliest memories was when we moved to Alcalde, in Pulaski County, southeast of Somerset, about 1923.  We lived in a big white frame house on the hill, with a big windmill over a well.  Mom and Pop had a country store down below the house with a post office.  The store was by the road just as it came across Pitman Creek.

The store was maybe about 30 feet by 50 feet.  It was perhaps a one story building at first, but a second story was added later on.  The store building was still standing in 1987, as was the frame of the bridge over Pitman Creek.  We had a lot of trouble with people breaking in the store and stealing things, so Poppy sometimes had to stay overnight in the store.  He would keep a gun with him to guard the store.

When Poppy bought the store, he paid cash for it, and the seller took off.  Come to find out, the fellow that sold the store still owed money on a lot of the goods.  Poppy got the sheriff and went after the man.  They caught him down at Burnside just before he got on a train.

The store was very popular as it also contained a post office.  People were always coming there to pick up their mail.  I remember always running in and out of that store.  One fellow that used to come there from Somerset was Billy Hughes (I think he worked on the railroad), a big red faced man that rode a big white horse.  He would scare me by saying he was going to take me with him when he left.

I remember riding in the wagon with Poppy to Somerset to pick up supplies and feed for the store.  Sometimes he would start off without me, and I would run up the lane, hollering and crying after him until he would stop the wagon and let me up there with him.  It was always a big trip to go pick up supplies.  We would usually stop at George Holtzenbach's to get a hamburger, or take some cheese and crackers to eat on the ride back home.  At that time a hamburger was 5 cents, and milk 10 cents a quart.

We also had about 25 or 30 milk cows with a dairy there at Alcalde.  The cows would be milked every day, everyone helped, and we would bottle the milk.  Whenever it was time to milk the cows, Ralph would show up at the barn with a cup.  We would milk into the cup and he would drink the raw milk.

Louis and Orville would help Poppy mostly on the farm, and Russell and Sam would deliver the milk around Somerset every day.  This was around 1925 and 1926.  Louis was the oldest, so he would be in his late teens about this time.  We had a one horse milk wagon with a glass front, and the draw reins for the horses would come through a that glass.  You would very rarely see automobiles at that time, most people still traveled by horse or on foot.

When we lived at Alcalde we attended church at Bear Wallow Holler.  Lum Farmer was the preacher there at that time.  I think he was some relation to my father-in-law, Willie Farmer.  Lum had a son named Otto that was a regular outlaw.  He would try to break up the church, he would drink, and carry guns. 

I remember one Sunday we were coming home from church and stopped by the store down below the house.  Out behind the store the local men liked to pitch horseshoes.  Otto Farmer was there and he took his coat off to throw some horseshoes, and he had a shoulder holster with a pistol under each arm!

One time Mom was coming out of church when Ralph and Ruth were still babies and nursing.  Mom was hit by a car and it was said that this accident caused Ruth to die from nursing on her poisoned milk.  When Ralph was still little, but was first starting to crawl around, he crawled up the windmill over the well near the house.  We found him one day up there and had to go up and get him down.

The social life at that time would be gatherings in the fall for apple peelings, corn shuckings, and bean breakings.  In the spring we would have Easter egg hunts.  We had a neighbor named "Cap" Ping who lived right next to the store.  He played the fiddle and we would go visit him to hear him play.

Some of Louis, Orville, and Sister's friends lived up the road.  Their last names were Godby and McKinney.  Other neighbors were the Pings, the Waddells, the Kinneys, the Sears (Alek Sears was caught making moonshine whiskey and got sent to the penitentiary), Whitakers (one-legged Johnny Whitaker carried the mail in a wagon), the Hams, and the Allans.  One time at Christmas, the McKinney boys road their horses down to the store.  They were drinking at the time, and made their horses rear up and buck all over.

Sometimes Uncle Clarence (Rambo) and Aunt Lena, who lived up at Maywood in Lincoln county, would drive their car down to visit and stay over the week-end with us.  I remember one time when I was very small Aunt Lena took me home with them in the car after a visit.  We went through Somerset to Woodstock past Hazeldale (this was where Mom was born).  At that time there were few bridges and just dirt and gravel roads.  We would have to cross the creeks in the car and slide through the mud.  The old Model T Ford didn't have any fuel pump, so we would have to back up hills to keep the engine running.

On the way we stopped and stayed all night at Uncle Henry Goff's place, that was Mom's sister's husband.  We had guinea to eat for supper that night, the meat was very dark.  People used to keep guinea hens just like a watchdog, because they would make a lot of noise when anyone would come around.  After we left Uncle Henry's we went on to Grand-dad Price's and then on to Maywood.

Anna Pearl was in charge of looking after the younger children - Ralph, Ruth and myself.  One time she was at the house alone with the children and she heard a sound upstairs, like a log chain being dragged across the floor.  She thought the house was haunted.

I only went to school one year while we lived at Alcalde, my first year.  I attended school at Rush Branch in a one room schoolhouse, and remember Anna Pearl and Sam taking me to school.  Near the first day of school, I had to be taken home by Anna Pearl because I filled my pants accidentally.

One time Anna Pearl was at the store and Mom sent her up to the house to check on the twins.  Mom said "Don't wake them if they are asleep, stay up there until they wake up".  At the house alone with the children she heard a sound upstairs, like a log chain being dragged across the floor.  She thought the house was haunted.  She woke the kids up, and ran back down to the store as fast as she could, carrying both of them.

There was candy in the store, but it was off limits for the children most of the time.  One time Anna Pearl had to go down from the house one night to the store to get some kerosene (we called it coal oil at the time).  It was late and dark, quite scary, so she swiped a piece of candy to help her along.  While she was down there, a ghost appeared.  Someone came along with a sheet over their head.  Anna Pearl thought it was Sam, but she wasn't sure, so she said "Sam, Sam, I know that's you!, I know that's you."  She was scared to death.

Poppy had a five year lease on the farm at Alcalde, about 100 acres, so we were there from about 1923 to almost 1928.  The store had a big coal stove in it for heat, and we had grates at the house.  We weren't too far from some coal mines, and the older boys would take a wagon to the mines and haul coal back home for heating.

1928

After we lived at Alcalde for 5 years, we moved back up to Lincoln county, about 35 miles north, to what was called the Simpson place.  When we moved, the older boys drove the cattle straight up highway 27, between Somerset and Stanford, which was gravel road at that time.  It took 2 days for the trip.  Mr. and Mrs. Crawford from Somerset (they owned the farm at Alcalde) took Mom to Lincoln county in their car.  I rode with them.  This was just before Nell was born in December of 1927.

At the Simpson place we lived in a four or five room house.  All nine children were still at home at this time.  I remember how dirty that house was when we first got there, and Mom had to give it a good cleaning, just like she did everywhere we moved.  She always had a full time job keeping the house and children clean.

The farm at the Simpson place was a couple of hundred acres where we raised corn and tobacco.  We never had too much in the way of material things.  One time Poppy had fourteen dollars which was to be used to buy all of us winter underwear.  He thought he had lost it and became quite frantic, until he finally found it.

One of the big thrills at the new place was that it was close to the train track (the Louisville and Nashville railroad).  We had never been around the trains before, and it was quite exciting to watch the trains go by and wave to the engineers.  We lived about a mile down the tracks from Uncle Clarence and Aunt Lena at Maywood, and used to walk up the tracks to visit with them and our cousins, Lib and Bob Rambo.

While we lived at the Simpson place, the trains on the L&N railroad passed every 20 to 30 minutes.  Freight trains, passenger trains, and coal trains hauling coal from the mountains would pass by.  Many small towns were stopping points for the trains, and Maywood had a passenger station and freight loading facility.  There was a passenger train that stopped at 4:00 A.M., at 11:00 A.M., and at 4:00 P.M. to pick up people and to let some off.  However, the hobos travelled on the freight trains, even though the railroad detectives tried to keep them off.  You would always see some people hitching a ride on every train that went by.

Where the train went by our house there was an uphill grade.  The steam engines would slow down and the hobos would jump off and come to the house to ask for something to eat.  They happened almost every day.  Mom wouldn't want to turn anyone away, but she would always try to get them to do a little work for her, such as chop some wood.  Then she would give them a bite to eat, maybe just some bread.

At the Simpson place we would go to school over at Saufley to a two room schoolhouse.  They had first through fourth grades in one room, and fifth through eighth in the other. 

I can remember going to school late in the fall without any shoes, but frost was already on the ground.  This wasn't unusual at that time when most people just had one change of clothes.  In the summer we never wore shoes or underwear.  At night your clothes wear hung on the foot of a bed on a nail in the wall.  Bathrooms were always an outhouse, and you would wash up outside in a bucket. People didn't seem to mind the spartan life.  They would get together to tell stories and joke around, the children were always playing one game or another.

At the Simpson place was the first place we ever had a car.  Poppy bought a 1926 Chevrolet, but since he had never driven before he would get out in the alfalfa field to practice.  Since he was used to horses and mules he would pull on the steering wheel and shout "Whoa!"  I am not sure this really happened, but we always kidded him about it anyway.  Poppy drove the car a while until he had an accident during a trip to Crab Orchard and destroyed the car.  That was the last time he tried to drive.

That car was kept down in the corn crib.  You could take a safety pin and turn on the switch.  Cars didn't have starters then, and you had a hand crank to start it.  Sam tried to start it one time with a safety pin, but he left the spark down and the car backfired, and the kick from the crank broke his arm in two places.  He came running back to the house with his crooked arm, and told me to throw away the safety pin and tell Poppy he fell down and broke his arm.

Another time Sam was fixing the heel on his shoe and cutting a nail in half to make it shorter.  The piece of nail flew up and hit him in the eye and damaged his sight.  He went to the doctor and got some medicine for his eye.  Mom and Pop were gone just after that, and Anna Pearl was playing doctor with that eye medicine, and put some in my eye.  My pupil got very wide, and Anna Pearl got scared and took all of us to Aunt Lena's.  It looked bad, but there was no real problem at all.

At the Simpson place one of the crops we raised was wheat.  At harvest time, Mike Jenton from Crab Orchard would bring his steam powered threshing machine around, and you would pay him so much a bushel to thresh your wheat.  He would show up with a crew of five or six, and all the neighbors would help haul the bundles of cut and shocked wheat.  The shocks would be fed into the threshing machine.  This was late in the summer and it would be very hot.

The custom at the time was for all the people working on the wheat threshing to stay and eat dinner there at the farm, and Mom would have to fix a big dinner to feed everyone.

At the Simpson place some of our neighbors were the Floyds, the Smith boys (friends of Orville), the Mathenys, the Brumetts that lived up the railroad tracks, the Badgetts, and Pit Sampson who lived over on the road.  He would cut our hair, and charge a quarter a head.

We also had an orchard, and Poppy would pick the apples in the fall.  We would dig holes in the ground and make a box to store the apples.  We would do the same with the potatoes and cabbage from the garden.  We would store them in the ground covered with straw to try to keep them cool and dry so they would last longer, so we could eat them during the winter.

1929 to 1930

We lived on the Simpson place about a year, then moved over to the Napier place about 2 or 3 miles away, but closer to Maywood, at the start of 1929.  1930 was a year of bad drought and the start of the depression.  Times were very rough then and poverty was widespread.  It was difficult to tell at that time just how bad things were as communications were sparse compared to today.

Sister got married in March of 1929 and died three days later of diabetic shock.  Not much was known about diabetes back then and it was a terrible blow to the whole family.  I remember how grieved Mom and Pop were at the time.  They had got another car by this time, but had to give it to the undertaker to pay for Sister's funeral.

When Sister died it was a sad, sad time.  We all got new overalls to wear to the funeral at the church.  She passed away at only 19.  She was the oldest girl and was one of the favorites, and had been a lot of help to Mom.  She helped raised the younger children, doing whatever job Mom gave her.

The house at the Napier place was similar to all the other houses: frame with a front porch, old coal stove for heat and a wood stove for cooking.  Furniture was scarce.  Some people may have had a living room set for their house, and the bedrooms always had iron bedsteads with a feather or straw mattress. 

The Napier house was the first electricity we had, before that we always used coal oil lamps for lighting.  While we used coal oil lamps, every Saturday the women would have to clean the lamps.  The globes would be covered with black suet and have to be cleaned, and the wicks trimmed off.  In 1930 was also the first refrigerator we had, and about that time we got a gasoline powered washing machine.

People had to find work wherever they could.  Poppy and Orville went with 3 other people in an old car up to Illinois to work shucking corn on a farm.  They stayed there about six weeks and were paid so much a bushel for their work, and would send a little money home for us to live on.  There was some government relief available, but Poppy never took any.  However, one time they were handing out oranges and grapefruits from a load that came through Stanford, and Poppy got some of those. Usually at Christmastime we would get an apple or orange, some homemade candy, and maybe a cap pistol. 

When we lived near Maywood we would go to church at Fairview Baptist Church at the top of Hall's Gap.  Mom had some chickens and would gather eggs and sell them to earn a little extra money.  She bought me my first suit for $4.98 by ordering it from the Sears and Roebuck catalog, so I would have something nice to wear to church.  Mom and Poppy were always hard-working and very industrious.  Before we would go to church, Mom would line us all up to wash us.  She would take a washpan and rag and go down the line and wash behind our ears, make sure our feet were clean, and always have clean clothes for us to wear.  It was major effort.  The whole family would go to church together.

Up at Hall's Gap they had a clearing and a tower where various celebrations were held, such as Fourth of July.  People would come from miles around in wagons, cars, and buggies.  Concession stands would be set up and usually a couple of airplanes would take people up for rides.  Sometimes horse races would be held.

In the summer of 1930 a plane was built there at Hall's Gap and was being tested.  I was watching from down in our yard at the Napier place about 3 or 4 miles away.  The plane's engine was too heavy for it and they had problems keeping it under control.  It hit the tower and went end over end down the side of the mountain and burst into flames, killing the two people in it.

Uncle Clarence was about the first person around those parts to have a radio and we used to go to his house to listen to it.  I believe the Napier place was the first time we had a radio or a Victrola with some records to play.  The radios at that time were almost as big as a console television would be today.  About the only station you could pick up would be WSM from Nashville, and we would listen to the Grand Ole Opry.

With so many children at home, cousins (Bob Rambo, Presley, and Wallace), and friends (Darrell Napier and Jim Boone) we would always have a house full of people.  Many times people would spend the night with us.  Mom and Pop never knew how many they would have for breakfast.  Mom would fix gravy and biscuits and sausage, and Pop never would say a would about having to feed so many, everyone was always welcome.  But if they were there on Monday morning Poppy would give them a job - carrying water and helping with the wash or working in the field.

Usually Monday was washday.  Water would have to be carried and heated, and Mom would wash with a washboard, no machines at this time.  But people didn't have a lot of clothes, one to wear and one to wash.  We also didn't have too many bedclothes, at least not too many sheets.

Orville and Presley would run around and get into scrapes now and then.  One time they got to drinking too much and decided to chase some black people.  The sheriff got after them and they were in trouble then.

When we lived at the Napier place, Poppy got a contract with the school to haul the children to school.  Some people had trucks, but he had a wagon that was fixed up as a school bus.  It had bars across it and canvas over the top with seats on each side.  The school board would pay him for taking children to school on a certain route.  He would leave home and go up by Maywood, on around through Hall's Gap and come on back down to Saufley and drop the children off.  We usually walked to school, it was about a mile.  This was the same place we attended when we lived at the Simpson place.

Home and school always consisted of a lot of discipline.  I had a good friend named Least in about the third grade.  One day after school, instead of coming home, I got on his bus and went home with him.  Mom and Pop thought something had happened to me, and looked all over for me.  They finally found me at the Least place, I had already gone to bed.  The next evening when I got home I saw Poppy standing with a big switch waiting for me.  He thrashed me pretty good with it.

One of the first paying jobs I ever had was working for a good neighbor of ours, Andy Gooch.  He was bailing hay and he hired me to drive his team around and around.  The horses drove the baler.  Other close neighbors were the Ball's, the Rogers', the Chadwell's, and the Floyd's.  Everybody knew everybody, and if you needed anything you could always count on each other to help one another out.  You could always borrow things from your neighbors.

There was a bad drought in 1930 and we had to haul water down from Hall's Gap (where there was a spring) on the wagon.  We would load it up with cans and barrels and make  a couple of trips a week for water.  People would always be lined up to get what water they could.

Most of the cash money we had during the depression would come from having chickens and selling the eggs, and from selling the milk from the seven or eight cows we had at the time.  The cream would be separated and would be sold in town.  At the Simpson place we had a spring house with a hand cranked cream separator in the house.  The money was mainly used to buy groceries.

We would take the wagon into Stanford with our eggs and to buy groceries.  At that time there was an area in Stanford that was like a parking lot for buggies, wagons, and horses.  There were two grocery stores in Stanford, one was an A&P.  Poppy would stay with the wagon and Mom and I would go to both grocery stores to see which one was paying the highest price for eggs.  Then Mom would send me back to tell Poppy so they would know where to take the eggs.  When I first went with them I got lost going back to find Poppy and when they finally found me I was very frantic.

Uncle Frank from Dayton, Ohio, would sometimes come to visit us.  He had several children.  Uncle John would also come from Dayton in his big, heavy, open car.  The car didn't have a roof.  We would all pile in it and he would take us down to Highland (the other side of Hall's Gap) or to a revival meeting.  It was the greatest thing to get to ride in Uncle John's car.

Our cousins, Wallace and Presley, lived not too far away at the foot of Hall's Gap.  Uncle Clarence and Aunt Lena lived about a mile away in Maywood.  Uncle Clarence was the foreman of a section gang on the railroad.  They were in charge of maintaining a 15 or 20 mile section of the railroad tracks, keeping it in good order.  That was the way the railroads were kept running, and Uncle Clarence had what was considered to be a very good job at that time.

Many of the men that worked on Uncle Clarence's section gang were black.  They were the sons and grandsons of slaves.  The blacks lived in a certain section of the county by themselves, and they had their own schools and churches.  Their housing was substandard compared to the housing of the white people.

Poppy would always be the first one to get up in the morning, usually about four o'clock, or even earlier in the summer.  Every evening someone always made sure there was fuel for the cook stove to build a fire the next morning.  Someone would have to split some wood each night for the next morning.  Out beside the house we had a wood pile and a coal pile.  We would cook mostly with wood or a little bit of coal in the cookstove, and use mainly coal to heat with.  We would take the wagon and team and gather wood in the fall so we would have enough for the winter, using a cross-cut saw and an axe.  We always had to have enough dry wood for kindling to start the fire, maybe some cedar, or even some coal oil would help it along.

Poppy would get a fire going and then would get Mom up and she would start breakfast.  You can imagine how much she had to cook with 10 or 12 or more to feed sometimes.  She would fry some meat to get some grease to make gravy and biscuits.  We usually had oatmeal for cereal, as it was very rare to have any store-bought box cereal.  Also never any store-bought bread, what we would call "light" bread.  We would have biscuits for breakfast and cornbread for dinner and supper.  Sometimes we would have rice for breakfast, but seldom any eggs as they were saved to be sold at the market.

Usually some of us would get up to go milk with Poppy while Mom was fixing breakfast.  Sometimes the horses or mules had to be harnessed early if they were to be worked that day, pulling the plows or cultivator or wagon, whatever we were going to need.  After breakfast was over the children would get ready to go to school.  We would have some biscuits and sausage, or biscuits and jam wrapped up in a piece of newspaper to take to school for lunch.   Those that weren't going to school would have to work in the fields. 

In the spring there was always lots of work, planting tobacco beds, cleaning up new ground, or plowing and planting.  From March until September the farm work was every day, daylight till dark.  No one ever looked at a watch, you just worried if it was light enough to work, with a break always at lunchtime.   When we lived near the railroad you always knew when the trains came by and we would use that as a signal for lunchtime.

At the end of the day the cows would always have to be gathered up to milk.  The milk would be sold however we could, sometimes to a cheese factory, sometimes delivered in town, whatever would bring in some cash.

In the fall we would take the wagon out to gather pumpkins.  Sometimes we would have a cow that would quit giving milk and we would feed those pumpkins to the cow to fatten it up.  Poppy would then kill the cow for beef.  We always seemed to have about five to ten hogs.  We would try to fatten them up and kill some in the fall.  We would cure the meat so we would have meat through the winter.

At hog killing time we had a pit dug out in the ground, called the hog box, lined with metal and wood, where we would build a fire to heat water.  We had a .22 rifle that Poppy would used to kill the hog.  He would then cut the hog and hang it up by the hind feet so it would bleed.  Then the hog would be put in the hot water, then taken out and the hair would be scraped off.

After that the hog would be hung up by the hind feet again and Poppy would dress him - take out the insides.  It was always cold, you never would kill a hog unless it was cold weather.  After the hog cooled down, Poppy would take a meat axe and "block" (butcher) the hog.  He would then cook up the various parts and we would make sausage on a hand cranked sausage maker we had.  The hams would either be hung in the smokehouse to cure for winter, or would be canned and put in jars for winter.  We didn't usually get to eat the hams as you could sell them.  Sometimes we would keep the shoulder or the side meat.

We mostly raised everything we ate, canning and preserving it to last a long time.  We would have a barrel of pickles in salt brine.  After they stayed there awhile, they would be taken out and put in vinegar.  Potatoes would be put in the cellar or buried so they would keep.

1931

About the start of 1931 we left the Napier place and moved pretty close to the store in Maywood.  That was where Granddad Sam VanHook had a store until he died about six years before, and a Mr. Davis ran the store when we lived there.  We lived in a small house near Uncle Clarence about a year.  Everyone was still at home.

We went to a church near Maywood that Granddad VanHook had helped build we he lived there some years before.  Uncle John and Aunt Berthie had a small farm down the road where they lived.                                

Poppy still had the contract with the school to haul children.  Then he went down the road about three or four miles and rented a farm from the Estridges where John Rigsby lived, to raise a tobacco crop.  It was amazing how he was always able to find a way to provide for his family.  Mom would fix dinner every day and take it down to the Poppy and the boys working in the fields.

One summer, baling hay at Maywood, it was so hot you would break out in a sweat at eight in the morning and still be sweating come six o'clock in the evening.  We always had to drink a lot of water.  One time I was driving the team of horses and had Sam on the straw stack, and Sam got so hot he passed out.  Years later at Preachersville, about the time I got out of high school, the same thing happened to me.  I was tying and stacking bales and got hot and passed out.

1932 to 1935

The winter of 1932 we moved about 10 miles to what was called the Dunn place, near Goshen, east of Stanford.   The Dunn place was on Dix River and we rented it from Mr. Dunn, who lived in Corbin.  We had a pretty large frame house, a typical farm house with grates for heat in each room, a wood cookstove, and a front porch with the back of the house backing up to the river.

That was the year Roosevelt took office and he started a lot of programs to help the depression.  The Civilian Conservation Corps was started to provide work for young people.  Orville joined the CCC and was sent to California to work in Yosemite National Park for 30 dollars a month.  We would get letters from him describing the beauty of Yosemite.  He would get 5 dollars spending money and 25 dollars would be sent home to the family.

At the Dunn place we had about 5 to 10 acres of tobacco and about 30 to 50 acres of corn.  Anna Pearl and I went to school in a one-room schoolhouse at Goshen.  We would walk the three miles to school each day.  We always had some horses and once in a while I would ride a horse to school.  We had a pet dog then, like we usually did when I was growing up.  We loved that little dog.  One time he was riding on the wagon and fell off and was run over and killed.  We all cried and cried over that dog.

At the Dunn place we also had a boat on the river and would go fishing.  On Sunday afternoons Poppy would go seining on the river with me.  Mom and a good neighbor of hers liked to fish, and I would go fishing with them and catch crappie out of the river.  At that time Dix River was very clean.

We always had enough to eat.  We would have fresh vegetables in the summer, and dried beans and canned goods in the winter.  On weekends we usually had fried chicken, that we would kill and clean ourselves.  Most things you ate you grew yourself, about the only thing that was bought at the store would be coffee, sugar, and salt.

We lived at the Dunn place for a couple of years.  While we lived there (3 Nov 1935) Louis and Ophelia got married.  It was just before he turned 26.  Many times we would go back up to Hall's Gap to go to church, as we had many friends from when we lived over there.  After church the families would get together to visit, especially the Spires (Ophelia's family), Uncle Clarence and Aunt Lena, and Rethie Berry and her family.  We would go to someone's house for a big dinner.  Occasionally they would come to visit us and we would have a fish seining and have a fish fry on the bank of the river.

The main road from Goshen was gravel, then we had a dirt lane going about a mile and a half back to the bend in the river where the house sat.  Oftentimes in the winter and spring when the road wasn't frozen over it would be very muddy and slick.  Cars would get stuck and you would have to take teams of horses to pull them out. 

After we left the Dunn place we moved up the river to the Grimes place between Stanford and Crab Orchard towards the Preachersville area.  This was at the end of 1935.  The Grimes place was a pretty good size farm, about 150 acres, not on the river but close to it.  The farm had an old brick house, with a living room, bedroom, kitchen, dining room and hall downstairs, two rooms upstairs, and a sort of dug out basement.  Poppy paid seventy-five dollars a year to rent the house.  Mr. Grimes' sister, Mrs. Mulberry, owned the place and we would work for her, building fences and such, to help pay the annual rent.

We raised tobacco and corn again.  We also had about 100 head of sheep.  We would shear the sheep and sell the wool, in a sort of partnership with Mrs. Mulberry.  Sometimes when a ewe would abandon a newborn lamb, and we would take the lamb as a pet and feed it and raise it.

Orville was back home from the CCC, and Russell was working at the cheese factory in Stanford.  Orville was helping Poppy raise a crop, and he was working for Charlie Boone for about a dollar and a half a day.  It would help buy the groceries. 

We lived at the Grimes place during my teens so I remember quite a bit about it.  The Lunsford boys lived over on Preachersville road, the Smith boys lived on the other side of us, the Boones, the James', the Lawrences, the Gooches were all our close neighbors.  The Smith boys were real outdoor types, always knew how to catch all kinds of fish and hunt anything.  The Lunsford boys had a car and I liked to run around with them and ride in their car.  One of the big things was to go to town on Saturday and go to the movies.  I didn't get to go too often, but they would always recount the entire movie, usually a western, in great detail the following week.

Sometimes on Sunday we would go in the Lunsford's car to Crab Orchard.  One time we got back about midnight and I had to walk through the fields back to my house.  I had on a new pair of shoes that I didn't want to get wet or dirty, so I took them off and walked barefoot the mile and a half back home.  It was very dark, then I came to a thicket of cedar trees where it was darker still.  I saw a big white thing in front of me that gave be a scare, but it turned out to be a big white cow.  I finally found the fence row and followed it on home, and was very glad to get there.

At the Grimes place after a hard day of working in the fields, plowing or baling hay or whatever, we would take a bar of soap and go to the river and take a bath.  No one had indoor bathrooms.  The younger ones would have to carry wood and water from the well for Mom for cooking and for the washing.  Mom had a big iron kettle out back for washing.  She would build a fire under that kettle to heat the water and put her clothes in the kettle and boil them.

We also had a large kettle for rendering lard when hogs were killed.  The lard would be stored in cans and used for cooking in the winter.  Sometimes we would have as many as half a dozen cans of lard, which weighed 40 to 50 pounds each.

The Kiminishes would give us horses to break and ride.  Sam was trying to break one in the barnyard and was thrown off.  Most everyone knew how to ride at that time.  We would ride to the fields to work, and ride to the neighbors to visit on Sundays.  Charlie Boone lived across the road from us.  He had two girls and a boy.  Each one of them had a horse, and they were as good a rider as you would see in a wild west show.  They would usually ride bareback.  Andy Gooch lived below us, and he had a daughter, Mary Margaret, who was also a good rider.

Many farms would build an ice house.  They would dig a pit about fifteen feet square and line it with rocks.  In the winter when the ponds would freeze over, they would cut the ice from the pond and store it in the pit covered with straw.  The ice would last until summer this way.  We would go over to Bowling's ice house near Crab Orchard, and get ice to make homemade ice cream. 

Seems like wherever we lived Mom always made some lasting friendships, as with Mrs. Smith when we were at the Grimes place.  Mom would sometimes get her work done early and would pay visits on the neighbors.  She always liked to mix with people.

We would never go to town, except on an occasional Saturday.  It was a big thing to go in during the day and stay until late that night.  People would take their car in, find a place to park on the main street, and the whole street would be like a carnival with people visiting one another.  Mom and Pop would do their shopping, sometimes we would go to the pool room, and it was a big social occasion.

We never had any heating or air conditioning like people have today.  In the winter whatever part was facing the fire would be warm and the other part would be freezing.  We always had enough covers to keep warm in bed.  In the summer, the flies would be all over the house.  Mom would fight the flies trying to get dinner ready.  Before we ate we would take sheets or branches and drive the flies out of the house the best we could, so we could eat in peace.

At the Grimes place we had a Chevrolet panel truck that we used to haul milk.  Poppy had a milk route and we would go around and pick up people's milk and deliver it to the cheese factory in Stanford.  Russell did most of the hauling, before he got a job at the cheese factory, and that was the way we paid for that truck.

While we lived at the Grimes place, from 1935 to 1939, we would go to Drakes Creek Baptist Church in Preachersville.  We attended pretty regularly, Sunday morning and night, and on Wednesday nights.  One time Johnny Carter had a revival there and Sam, Russell, Anna Pearl, and I were baptized in a pond.  The church formed most of the social life, with meeting people, and having folks over for dinner, and the like.

We would take corn or wheat for grinding to Preachersville.  The mill would keep part of the corn meal or flour for payment, and we would take the rest home to make our bread.  Many times I would ride a horse or mule over to that mill.

When I started high school I had to go to Stanford to school.  Seems like my first year of high school I stayed with Uncle Clarence and Aunt Lena at Rowland close to Stanford. We would have to catch a ride with somebody, and one year Anna Pearl and I rode to school with a Campbell boy that lived down the river.  Poppy gave him a calf to pay him for letting us ride with him to school.  In my junior year I would walk across the fields a couple of miles to Crab Orchard road to catch a bus.

In high school I grew taller, about six feet, but only weighed 135 pounds.  I was kind of gawky, and not too good at sports, except for softball or baseball.  They did have some boxing gloves at the school, and I hung up a bag of straw in the barn and taught myself how to box.  We would have informal matches at the school and I got pretty good, which built up my confidence.  One of the boys I boxed with (Pettis boy?) later went on to become a light-weight champion at the University of Kentucky.

1939

From the Grimes place we moved over to the Owens place in 1939, about a mile from the store at Preachersville.  We lived in a big two story house with big columns on the front, and high ceilings.  This was the last place Sam lived before he went to Ohio to work.  I was still home and worked with Poppy in the hay that summer.  We were working in the bottom at Leonard Carson's, and I got hot and passed out.

As the older boys got married and moved away the younger ones took their place with the farm work.  I was real close to Poppy at that time, as we were working together every day.  I remember feeling eighteen, strong and healthy.  The front of our house had a sort of veranda on top of the columns, over the front porch, and I would drag my bed out there on summer nights and slept out in the open.

Some of our neighbors at the Owens place were the Suttons and the Rigsbys.  We would go to the Drakes Creek Baptist Church on Sundays, but would go to the Methodist church on Wednesday nights for prayer meeting.  The Lunsford boys would still come by and I would go with them into Crab Orchard.  It was a small town, but it was where I saw my first movie, at the theater there.

1940 to 1941

In 1940 I went to Washington Courthouse, Ohio, and went to work in a cheese factory owned by the Cudihay Packing Company.  My cousin, Bob Rambo, was working there and got me a job.  He had married Josephine Thompson from Preachersville, and I stayed with them in Ohio and paid them five dollars a week rent.  Bob and Jo only stayed in Ohio about six months, then he took a job with his dad in Louisville as a switchman on the railroad.

I then had to get a room in a rooming house for seven dollars a week, but that included meals.  My job at the cheese factory was running the can washer.  I would wash about 25 truck loads of cans a day.  The job was hard, but being right off the farm, it wasn't too bad.  I made thirty-five cents an hour.

At the end of 1940 I quit my job and moved to Piqua, Ohio, where Sam and Orville were.  They were working for a company in Troy that made metal chairs.  Orville and Althene had a little apartment for them and their two little children (Don and Linda), had Sam staying with them, then I showed up.  Later Orville rented a house on Cottage Avenue and we all moved there.

In 1941 I started working for Lear Avia in Piqua, one of Bill Lear's companies.  They manufactured radio directional finders for airplanes.  Orville and Sam also got jobs there.  Bill Lear was young at that time, and we would see him in the plant every day, before he became famous for his Lear Jet.

1942 to 1945

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the war began.  On January 15, 1942, I went down to Patterson Field at Dayton and enlisted in the Air Force (the Army Air Corps).  I went through basic training there, then in May rode a troop train for five days to Los Angeles.  We spent the night on Angel Island, then got on a ship with no idea where we were going.  Twenty-three days later we landed in Melbourne, Australia.

We slept in a cricket stadium the first night in Melbourne, then boarded a train for a seventy-five mile journey north to Tragowel.  There was a small base there with some barracks.  My outfit was about 150 men, supporting aircraft maintenance and supply.  We stayed there until about October of 1942.

We took a train about 2000 miles up the Australian coast to Townsville, about 10 degrees south of the equator.  That was to be the support air base for aircraft in the South Pacific.  For the next year we all worked inconstruction, no matter our regular job description.  We built hangers, supply buildings, motor repair shops, and the like.  After the year was over we went back to our normal jobs, and I was a shipping supply clerk.  We would ship supplies out by boat or by C-47 air transport.

Townsville had a population of about ten thousand, but at one time played host to about one hundred thousand servicemen.  There was infantry, artillery, as well as air force.  Townsville was an Australian country town, where they would bring cattle in from the cattle stations for sale.  They had dirt streets with wooden sidewalks.  The weather was very tropical.

The first year we were there we lived in four-man tents, with the mess hall being the only building.  We were in those tents in 1943 when I got word of Poppy's death in April.  I found out about it 30 days late in a letter from Anna Pearl, as I never got the telegram they sent me when he died.

We stayed in Townsville until September of 1944 when we loaded onto Liberty ships to make the trip to the Philippines.  We stopped twice on the way in New Guinea, and there was a big build up of ships in both harbors, with the invasion of the Philippines beginning.  It was too hot to stay below in the ship, but the deck was covered with supplies.  So we just pitched our tents on top of the supplies, and I lived for 35 days on the deck of the ship as we headed up through the Pacific.

We were getting two meals a day, with all food dehydrated, no fresh vegetables or fruits.  We arrived in Lehte on December 1, 1944, about six weeks after the initial invasion.  There was still fighting going on about five or ten miles away.  Christmas day of 1944 I remember the trucks and ambulances going by our tent on the muddy road.

Later we were able to move our camp down near the beach and set up a salvage yard.  With all the wrecked planes, there were lots of parts to salvage.  Finally the Japanese were driven out of that area, and in March of 1945 we loaded onto an LST and traveled up to Luzon.

Our ship convoy was the first one in the harbor after the battle there at Manila.  The harbor was full of half-sunk ships and we had to weave all around them.  Manila was a deserted city.  No one remained to be seen.  About two days later the people started coming down out of the mountains and the city came to life.  We went to a place about six miles outside Manila, called Neilson Field, where there were some Japanese barracks and warehouses.  We set up camp there and started shipping aircraft supplies.

At Neilson Field I got orders to go home in May of 1945.  I got on a troop ship, came through the Panama Canal, and after about 35 days landed at Newport News, Virginia.  From there I took a train to Camp Atterbury, Indiana, where I got a 30 day leave to come home, the first time since 1942. 

While I was in Ohio, Poppy had moved from the Owens place back to the Napier place where he ran a gas station at the corner of Maywood Road and Highway 27.  Later he moved to the Bourne place out on McCormack Church Road west of Stanford.  That is where he passed away.  When he died Mom, Ralph, and Nell held an auction and sold all his machinery and tools and Mom moved into an apartment in Stanford.

I rode the bus to Stanford and walked down the street with an old duffel bag over my shoulder to where Mom was waiting, and she was overjoyed to see me.