Picking cucumbers - When you live on the farm is good to have a cash crop. We had two cash crops actually I guess there were three. The crop that was the most labor-intensive was cucumbers. We divided our acreage into two parts because you had to pick the cucumbers every other day. If you didn't pick them every other day they got too large. The smaller the cucumber the more you were paid per pound. Cucumbers were rated as one two three or cull. Grade one was the smallest cucumber and although you could be paid more per pound it took more of them to make a pound. So we actually made more money on grade two. During cucumber harvest time we work six days a week. Since we rotated feels every other day and took Sunday off the patch that we picked on Monday and Tuesday at three days growth and were larger. Harvesting cucumbers is a labor-intensive job. To pick them by hand and find them in amongst the vines not an easy thing to do because the vines and the cucumbers are both green. And since they're so closely grounded is backbreaking job. In removing the cucumber from the vine there is some juice where the cucumber comes loose from the vine. This juice stains your hands and sustain is one that builds up over time. There is no soap made by man that can remove it. You must wear it into you where it off. It's easy to find a cucumber picker because his hands will be black. I said hands actually its fingers and the palm of the hand.

Most of the form work we did we did not get paid for doing it. But the cash crops my father paid us, for cucumbers we were paid by the bushel. While we got paid for the work it was still a good deal for my father because we had to use the money we made to buy our school clothes.

Killing Old Rascal  - The killing of old rascal was a hard thing for us boys. We first met the dog we called Old Rascal when he belonged to a neighbor of ours. We would pass our neighbors house on the way to school. This dog was just a pup then. He would come running toward us barking we would ignore him and he was right close to us than we would holler at him and run at him slapping our pants legs. He would tuck his tail between his legs and ran off yapping.

Somewhere along the road the neighbor gave the dog to our dad. I don't know that I ever heard why. But we ended up with the dog and he was a good dog. He was a good stock dog and a good hunting dog. We hunted squirrel with him, he treated them we shot them. He became also a good guard dog. It was his ability as a guard dog that brought his demise. The older he got the meaner he became. There were four of us children, and it did not matter which one of us it was, who could control the dog. When company came we would simply put our hand on the dog and he would be still until the person had walked in the front gate into the house. When the screen door close on the man as he walk in the house we would let go of the dog. The dog would lunge at the man again the screen door. We had to repeat the same action when the man was laying the house, that is lay our hands on the dogs back until the man without the gate. When we took our hand on the dogs back he tried to get at the man through the fence. This happened with all visitors who came to see us.

One day when none of us children were at home a man came for a visit. Only my mother and father were at home. My dad had to hold the dog off with a pitchfork while a man came into the house. He had to repeat the same action as the man was leaving. My dad said," I won't have a dog around this house that I can't control." There was another man in our community who wanted such a dog. My brother and I took the dog over to the man's house and tied the dog up. The man fed the dog every day and gave it water. Every day when the man came out of his house the dog lunged against his chain trying to get the man. This went on for two weeks with no good results. Finally, he told us boys to come and get the dog. My dad told us we would have to put the dog down. We came and took the dog down into the woods. My brother had brought the 22 which was a single shot gun. I watched this scene, my brother pointing the 22 rifle at the dog's head a short distance away and the dog wagging his tail at my brother, and tears running down my brother's cheeks, as he pulled the trigger. This was a hard thing to do. It is better to do the hard thing than for someone, especially a child to be attacked by a vicious dog.

Killing kittens and pups

Another chore that I did not like to do was to kill kittens and pups. When you have cats and dogs they can produce more kittens and pups and you can handle. You can't give them away because everybody in the country already has their own kittens and pups. If you don't destroy them you will be overrun with cats and dogs. My dad gave this chore to me and my brother. He would say," you boys take the kittens or pups out and kill them." There was no discussion there was just obedience. My brother and I wanted to do it in the most humane way. But there were not a lot of choices left to us as to how we did it. It would've been nice if we could put them to sleep, and option we did not have. So we would take the hind legs of the pup or kitten and swing with all of our might and crush their head into a tree or a rock so that they would die instantly. You know they have died instantly when there is no crying on their part.

I know this sounds cruel but it was more humane than what city people did. They wood box up there kittens and pulps and bring them into the country and dump them. This left infant kittens and pups to fend for themselves which was something they could not do. These kittens and pulps starve to death which is a hard way to die. This is cruel and unusual punishment.

Picking Ticks

My least favorite thing to do was to the de-tick myself. The Ozark Mountains were full of ticks. There were big ticks, medium ticks, small ticks and seed ticks. Whenever you were out and about in the fields and woods you would gather ticks. When you brush by grass and limbs on trees the ticks would transfer onto your clothing. From there they would crawl into your body. These ticks would get to your underarms, in your hair, on your back, on your private parts, legs and about anywhere. They would bite into you and if not removed they would swell up and become fat. Sometimes when we had been out for a long time my brother and I would go behind the house strip our clothes off and de-tick each other.

Making sauerkraut

I love the times when we could make sauerkraut. We grew the cabbage in our garden. We took a number two wash tub into the garden and cut cabbage off the stock and carried them to the porch. We took off the top leaves in order to get the dirty leaves out of the way. We cut the cabbage away from the core and cut it in long slices. My favorite part of cabbage is the core. I love to eat the core when it's fresh.

We had a wide mouth crock jar. This jar was a little over 2 feet tall. We would put a layer of cabbage which had been sliced and cover that with salt. We would put another layer of cabbage and add another layer salt. Thus we layered cabbage and salt to the top, check that, almost to the top. We would take a clean cloth which was white and place over the top of the last layer salt. We would take a rock which had been cleaned and lay it on top of the cloth. This would hold the cabbage down while it was souring. We children were always slipping into the crock jar removing the rock and the cloth and taking out the cabbage and eat it while it was in the process of souring.

Picking huckleberries, blackberries and wild plumbs

One advantage of living in the country was the many fruits that you could gather that grew wild. My grandmother and we children would gather lard buckets (gallon tin buckets that we bought lard in) and head for our favorite huckleberry patches. This was hard work. You could not very well get down on your knees to pick the huckleberries as this would crush the plants. So it meant you had to bend over while you were picking the huckleberries. You also had to be aware of snakes. There are a variety of snakes that live in the Ozarks of Arkansas. Some of these are poisonous snakes, for example the rattlesnake, copperhead and water moccasin. You did not want to reach for huckleberry only to have a poisonous snake put its fangs in your hand. So you had to be very careful where you step and we put your hands.

Rattlesnakes do not like to be around people so they tend to move away when they hear you coming. Moccasin are generally found around water for not much to contend with and picking huckleberries. But copperheads do not move away from people and are likely to be found where there are ripe berries that small rodents might want to eat.

It is however, a beautiful site to see several lard buckets full of huckleberries. When we got home with our huckleberries we had to wash them and cleaned them. Then they would be canned and fruit jars for use later on where they would be put in pies or make jelly out of them.

Blackberries were my favorite. Not that they were easy to pick, they were not. They tend to grow in thickets which are very close together. They grew to heights off for the 6 feet tall. One good thing about picking them you did not have to bend over. The bad part about picking them was that they had briars on them. At the end of the day picking blackberries the ends of your fingers would be pricked. All day long you were picking briars out of your fingers. But the end result was worth all of the pain. As the old sage says, "no pain no gain." Some of these blackberry thickets would cover an area larger than the big back yard. In order to get to the berries in the middle of the thicket we would take boards that were about 8 feet long and 12 inches wide, we would ladies board up against the blackberry bushes and began walking on the board which would cause the bushes in front of us to go down to the ground and allow us to walk out of the board for 8 feet. This would let us pick the berries on both sides of the board. Of course we would destroy the berries were the board was setting but better to destroy some berries then not be able to get to the others. When we were at the end of the 8 feet of the board we would place another such board and walk out on it etc. etc. thus we conquered blackberry thickets.

Blackberries have many uses but my favorite one is blackberry jelly. The process of making the jelly was to clean the blackberries by washing them thoroughly. Removing all lambs and stems and leaves saw all that was left was just blackberries. You would then heat them in a pan with a little bit of water on to the berries would begin to disintegrate. You would then push them through a colander to begin the process of removing the juice. A colander would remove most of the seeds. But to get the pulp out you had to use cheesecloth. You would put the cheesecloth over a large bowl and pour the pulp and juice on it. The juice would easily go through it meeting the pulp in the cheesecloth you would wrap the pulp around the cheesecloth and squeeze more juice out. From the juice she would make jelly and from the pulp you would make jam. To make both jam and jelly you had to add sugar. You had to cook it long enough for it to jell.

We had a couple of wild plumb thickets on our farm. These plum bushes grow to about 6 to 8 feet tall. The size of these plum were a little larger than the largest of grapes. They turned a bright yellow when they were ripe. We cook these in water until they were soft then ran them through a colander to remove the seeds and peelings. We then added sugar and salt and cooked it until it jelled.

Balking horse

One time my father decided to redo the kitchen porch. He tore the wood out from the old porch. He needed to excavate a good bit of dirt in order to build a new porch. He hooked a mare and a mule to a wagon. He backed the wagon into a spot where he could shovel the dirt from underneath the old porch into the wagon. He had built sideboards on the wagons would could hold a lot of dirt. The ground where the wagon was sitting was soft and the weight of the dirt in the wagon cause the wheels of the wagon to dig deep into the ground. When he started to move the wagon with horses the mare balked. The mule was straining to pull the wagon forward but the mare was holding back so that made him you need to pull not only the wagon of dirt but the mare who was pulling backwards.

This was the first and only time in my life that I heard my dad swear. He was a very angry man at that moment he grabbed one of the timbers that was holding the sideboards on and jerked it out of its position and struck the mare on the rump as hard as he could. When this timber which was a 4 x 4 came down on the back of the mare she lunged forward with enough force that the wagon started moving forward. That was the end of her balking. And this was the first and only time I ever saw an animal balk.

Plowing with horses and mules

My father never owned a tractor but he did owned horses and mules. As a boy I had learned how to catch the horses, harnessed them, and hook them to the plow. One plow I had to work with a lot was called a double shovel. This plow had two metal prongs that went down into the ground. One prong was in front and one prong was in back. The prong in back was set over about 8 inches. Attached to these prongs were the plow blades. These plow blades were triangular in form and had a bolt that fasten them to the prongs. The sharp end of the triangle blade went down into the dirt and the two sides of the triangle push the dirt to the side. 

You could burst your ribs plowing with a double shovel in new ground. New ground is ground that has trees cut off of it and has been cleared for planning crops. It is easy enough to cut trees down. But the roots of the tree go everywhere across the ground. Some of the roots are deep enough that you don't have to deal with them. It is roots close to the surface that give you the problems. When you walk behind a double shovel you walk in between the handles. These handle strike you about the middle of your waist or just about where your ribs are. The horse is a powerful animal and when he is moving along at a good clip and one of your plow blades hits a big root causes the plow to go sideways the axis being the blade of the plow and the handle pops into your site at a terrific force. I've had this happened to me several times. Sometimes I would have to stop for a while to regroup.

Living in tin houses

Some of the labor camps that we lived in during those years that we worked in the fruit were metal houses. One such labor camp was close to Weedpatch California. The town of Weedpatch was about 40 miles from Bakersfield California. The afternoon temperature in July around Bakersfield California and be up the hundred and 120°. Can imagine trying to live in a metal house with the outside temperature 120°? It was like living in an oven. It had these advantages, you could clean it by hosing it down, it was durable, it was cheap and after all you only had fruit tramps living in it. We did not stay indoors during the heat of the day and the temperature in the desert drops drastically after dark.

Picking peaches

One of the jobs we used to do when we worked in California was to go to Marysville, Yuba City area and pick peaches. The peach trees were laid out in the field in straight rows and the trees were the same distance from one tree to the next tree. You could pick peaches on the lower branches standing on the ground. But for the peaches on the higher limbs you had to use a ladder. The ladder use was a high three pronged ladder. The first three or four steps of the ladder was wide then they narrowed down and you went toward the top. The third leg of the ladder was attached at the top by a hinge. When you pick the ladder up the hinge on the third leg of the ladder came back into the ladder. You position the ladder facing the tree in the place he wanted to be and then pushed out the third leg of the ladder into the tree thus making a tripod. You ascend the ladder to the higher limbs the tree and pick peaches there.

The temperature in this part of California at peach picking time was over hundred degrees. But when you were picking peaches in among the branches the temperature could get up to as high as 120°. You would get hot and sweaty and peach fuzz would filter down around the neck of your shirt and itch would drive you crazy. You put the peaches you picked into a canvas bag. This bag had a built-in hoop at the top with straps around your neck. The bottom of the canvas bag was open and had to straps attached to both sides. You would take over straps and bring them up to the top of the loop and attached them there. By doing this you double the bag in such a way that the peaches could not follow the bottom. When the bag was full of peaches you came down the ladder went over to a wood box undid the straps and that peaches fallout the bottom into this wood box. We were paid $.07-$.08 a box the amount of money you made dependent on how hard you could work. I could pick somewhere between 150 and 200 boxes a day. In the 1950s that was good money for a teenager.

Stripping sorghum cane leaves and making sorghum

One job we worked at when we were children was on my daddy's farm. We grew sorghum cane, the juice was used to make sorghum syrup. Sorghum cane looks a lot like cornstalks. Not quite as large around as cornstalks are but they have the overall general appearance of cornstalks. After the sorghum cane has reached its maturity stage, my dad would take a sharp knife and cut the heads off. The head grew on the top of the stalk and was covered with hundreds of seeds. The seeds could be used as chicken feed or two plant next year's crop of sorghum cane. It was the stalks that we wanted to use for making sorghum syrup. The sorghum cane stalks were filled with a juice which was used in making sorghum syrup.

From a small plank my dad would make what looked like a hand sword made out of wood with one side sharp and the handle on the other end. With this wood sword we children would attack the stalks in the field and cut the leaves from the stalk. These lease we would bundle up for feed, to feed the cows. This left the stock standing bear in the field. With a team of horses pulling a wagon we would go through the fields cutting the stalks off at the ground and loading them onto the wagon. When the wagon was full of sorghum stalks we would haul the stalks over to a mill that my mother's uncle had.

I called it a mill but it was more like a press. There were three large rollers standing vertically on the end attached to the top was a long pole. This press was attached to large timbers and the press itself weighed probably close to 500 pounds. This long pole was about 20 feet long and was attached to the mill with about 5 feet sticking out on one end and 15 feet on the other end. To the 15 foot into the pole we hooked a single tree pulled by a mule or a horse. The animal would walk in a circle pulling the pole thus turning the rollers of the mill. A man would set next to the press feeding the stalks into the press thus abstracting the juice from the stalks. This juice ran out into a number two wash tub. This juice would be carried to the cooking vat. 

The cooking vat was about 3 feet wide and 10 feet long. It was placed upon a brick fireplace. A wood fire was built under the cooking vat. The vat itself was about 8 inches deep and divided by many metal walls with doors that could be closed or open. Starting on one end of the vat these metal doors alternated sides going to the end of vat. You would start cooking the sorghum juice pouring in on one side of the vat and as it cooked you would move it through the doors to the other end of the vat. You put the raw juice on one end and took the sorghum syrup out the other end. As the sorghum cooked a foam would be on top of the juice. This was a sticky foam and us kids would take a sorghum stick and collect the foam and eat it. We would collect the sticky foam on a stick much like the man at the county fair does when he collects cotton candy on a stick. We were walking in high cotton when we ate this stuff.

The following paragraph I took from Google where someone explains the process I was talking about above.

The evaporator was partitioned at regular intervals throughout its length with gates or openings on every partition, alternated to control the flow of juice as it meandered through the channels to the finishing compartment, where it was completed and drawn off into containers ready for

market or home consumption.  The cooking vats were placed over a furnace and

fired by wood.

Knocking almonds One year my brother and I contracted to knock almonds for a man. The almond trees were in neat rows. They're about the size peach trees. The branches were low-down and easy to climb up into. Each morning when we arrived at the man's farm, we would put a harness on the horse, attach it to long sled and head out into the field. The sled was about 16 feet long and about 3 feet wide. On one side it had a large canvas cloth which was split down the middle. We would unroll those cloths so that one part of the cloth when on one side of the tree and the other cloth will go the other side of the tree. We would climb up into the tree and with a mallet that we carried in her hand. The mallet was like an ax handle that had a rubber tire wrapped around it. We would hit the branches without mallet and almonds with falloff on the tarp. We would pick up the tarp and walk back toward the sled thus dumping the almonds into the sled.

We did make much money on that job because the farmer kept adding trees to our contract. We would finish one stand of trees and he would add another stand of trees. It was not a very successful operation.

Picking up potatoes

 After the Second World War in the 1950 we started going to California in the spring to work in the fruit. We would stay all summer and then my folks would find a ride for us to go back to Arkansas to stay with Grandma Taylor and go to school. One of the jobs that I had when I was living in California was picking up potatoes. This is a very dirty job. We would go to field early in the morning. We would arrive before daylight. As soon as we could tell the difference between a potato and clod of dirt we would begin working. We would wear a belt around our waist that had hooks attached to a board which would strike us about midway between the knee and hip. The top of the board was attached to the belt. At the bottom of the board were two hooks separated by about 10 inches. The belt was a broad belt that had two large hooks on both sides in the back. On those large hooks in the back were hooked potato sacks which had metal rings in it which were about 10 inches apart. The sacks were about 4 feet long. They had at black mark diagonally across the top about 8 inches down from the top. With these sacks hooked by the metal ring to the hooks on the bottom of the board the sacks were thrown between your legs. When the digger would come by dusk will roll out from it and cover us with the cloud of dirt. We were wet and sweaty in the dust clinging to us so that the only thing you can see of us was the white of our eyes. We would throw the sack between our legs, bend over, and start picking up potatoes. When this sack filled up to the black mark which was on it we would set that sack aside reach around behind and grabbed another sack and start putting the potatoes in it.

We usually got paid about seven cents per sack in order to make seven dollars you had to pick up 100 sacks of potatoes. I could usually pick up about 200 sacks per day. Which meant, I would make about 14 dollars a day. That was not a bad salary for a 16-year-old boy and the 50s. As I stated earlier we start working around daylight in the morning and work till about two o'clock in the afternoon. By that time it was so hot out in the field we had to stop working. We would head back to the labor camps where we were staying. We would clean up by showering and putting on clean cloths. Some days we go to town and go to a movie and other days we would play basketball. Some days we just hang around doing nothing. It was hard work but we had a lot of fun doing it.

Don’t get your ears washed by someone who is mad at someone else

          When my youngest sister was born my folk sent us over to Grandma Taylor house. She and my dad went to his only sisters home where Evelene was born. The time of the year was a few days before Christmas 1941. Grandma was living in a cabin which was a stone’s throw from the Witts Springs Cemetery. On Sunday morning my Grandmother told Wanda to wash my ears to get ready for church. I was six years old at the time. Wanda did not want to do it so Grandma came down hard on her and told her to do as she was told. She proceeded in a manner that showed she was not happy to obey. I was receiving a good deal of pain so I decided that I would quit the premises and go home to mommy. I lit out as fast as my legs could carry me. My Grandma could not have caught me and since I had a head start my sister was having a hard time catching up with me. My brother and a cousin who was also there at the time could have caught me in a hurry. But they were running alongside my Grandma asking what she was going to do when she caught me. I was making good my escape until I came to a barbed wire fence. I could not jump it but I could crawl under but when I had to slow up to crawl under it my sister caught me. My Grandma gave me a good thrashing all the way back to the cabin.

Playing on the roof

This is a story that I do not have any recollection of except that I heard my dad tell it on more than one occasion. It was the only time that I received a whipping from my father. On the farm that we lived at the time there was a smoke house which was a small building in which to smoke and store pork. My sister and brother who were older than me would help me to get on top of the roof so we could play. My dad told us a time or too that we were not to do that but they keep on doing it so he told them the next time I catch you on the roof I will give you a whipping. True to child like action they keep doing it but would watch for him and get down before he could see them. One day they got busy playing and by the time they saw him he had already saw us. They were just getting me down when he came upon them. He said he gave us all a whipping, but realized after that he should not have given me a whipping because I could not have gotten on the roof without their putting me there. While I don’t remember the incident it might have made such an impression on my young mind that I never did disobey my father and never remember receiving a whipping from him. I do have memory of many a whipping from my mother. My mother never gave spankings. That is far too tame a word for what she gave to us children. They were whippings and when she was through you knew you had been whipped.

If a handful of grapes is good a bucket full may not be better

When I was around six years old my family made our first trip to California to work in the harvesting of fruit. My mother had a sister who lived in California at that the time and we went there to earn money because times were hard. Our country was just coming out of the great depression. We worked at various jobs such as picking hops, chopping cotton, picking peaches and cutting grapes. This was a young boys dream to see acres of grapes that were ripe for the picking and eating. Being six years old I could not work but there was nothing keeping me from eating all the grapes I could hold. My folks were busy working and I was left to tend to myself so I began to eat grapes. They were wine grapes. They were white grapes and sweet to the taste. I ate and I ate on that first day. After a while I got very sick. So much so that I began to vomit until I thought my insides were going to come out also. I learned that if a little is good than a lot is not better.

Don’t scare someone with a chopping ax in his hand

One day my father had my brother Leroy working on a fence that was make of rails. The rails were getting old and the neighbor’s cows were getting into our land where we had crops planted. He had my brother cutting down saplings; these are small trees, to fix the gaps so the cows could not get into our crops. The fence went through a wooded area. When it was lunch time my mother sent my older sister, Wanda to go call him to come to lunch. As she approached him he was working with a chopping ax and had his back to her. She thought it would be fun to scare him. So she sneaked up behind him and yelled real loud. For some reason she squatted down as soon as she yelled and that was what saved her. Because when she scared him he turned swing the ax as hard as he could. The ax just grazed the top of her head, if she had remained standing he would have laid her open with blade of a sharp ax. If the blow did not kill her she would have most likely bleed to death before she could have been taken to a doctor. We had no automobile at the time and dad was not at home at that time. By the time help could have arrived and then be driven 30 miles over dirt roads to a doctor she most likely would not have survived.

The danger of teasing your little brother

My brother, Leroy was forever teasing me about this or that. One day he began to tease me about a girl in a neighboring community. That went to the same school we attended. She was from a very poor family and always came to school dirty and smelly. My brother was telling me that she was my girl friend and he just went on and on. I got angry with him and began to throw rocks at him. He was hiding behind the wood pile to escape from the rocks. I hurled one with all the strength I could muster just as he raised up from behind the wood pile and caught him in the forehead. The force of the rock almost knocked him out and it cut his skin and blood was pouring out. He ran crying to my mother and I got a good thrashing from my mother. He got a large knot on his head and a lesson that although I was smaller I could deliver a good blow with a rock.   

Removing the head from a chicken

When we would have company in the summer time after church we would need to kill a chicken or two in order to have meat. Since we had no refrigeration we could not go to the freezer to get it. I had watched my grandmother take a chicken by the head and in a quick twisting movement of the hand and wrist she would have the chicken head in her hand and the rest of the headless chicken was flopping on the ground. When I tried to do this the chicken just got up and ran off with its head in tack. I never did learn how to do that trick so I held the chicken by the feet and laid it head on the chopping block and cut it off with an ax.

Learning to swim without an instructor

 One of the fun things that hillbilly boys love to do is to go in swimming in the ponds and creeks. We always did this in our birthday suits. There is no one to teach you how to swim you must learn on your own. My brother was bolder than myself so he learned how to swim very fast. I was more cautious. So when we would go in swimming I would play around the edges. They would encourage but I was not buying it. But I could tell that it was more fun to swim than just play around the edges. One day I discovered that I could lie on my back and float. After that it was easy to begin to paddle with my hands and feet. I swam across the swimming hole a time or two on my back then simply flipped over on my stomach and started swimming. 

The wrong way to retrieve a hat

 We were picking cotton in Mississippi County AK. One day after work we loaded into the pickup to go to the place where we were staying. There were a good number of us in the back of my dad’s truck. I was in the very back and my hat blew off my head. I knew that I would catch it from my mother if she had to buy be another hat. It was a field dirt road so my dad was going about twenty miles an hour. I quickly decided to retrieve my hat and forgot to run by holding on to the back of the truck. The next mistake I made was to just step of the truck with my back to the truck. I quickly became a human ball rolling behind the truck. Luckily a human ball does not roll very far. Outside of getting pretty dirty and scuffed up some I came out alright and retrieved my hat and walked home.

Stealing a ride at night

       Sometimes at night when we wanted to go somewhere in a hurry we would steal a ride on the back of a truck by stationing ourselves on a steep hill and as the truck slowed down of the hill we would run and grab a hold and clime on for a ride the problem would come when we wanted to get off. If the truck was not going too fast we could hold on and run behind it and then let go, if it was going too fast you took quite a tumble.

Grandma and the temperamental cow

 My grandma Girty Taylor was a very determined woman. We had a cow that would only let my dad milk her. It happened that my dad had to go away on a work assignment which took him from home for an extended time. First we could not get the cow to go into the stall to milk her. But we had a little feist dog that was a great stock dog. We named her curly, she would chew the heels off of a cow if the cow would not do what she wanted the cow to do. So we sic-ed curly on the cow and he put her into the stall in short order. After a few times all we had to do was start calling the dog and the cow would go into the stall. However, she would kick like a Missouri mule. So my grandma had my brother and me to help her build a shoot that was too narrow for the cow to turn around in. We built it so we could insert a wood two-by-four in front of her back legs which prevented her from kicking my grandmother. The cow won the battle by holding up her milk until she went dry.

Squirrel hunting

One of the things I loved doing as a boy was squirrel hunting. There were two way to hunt squirrels. One was to do it with a dog the dog would find the squirrel for you and when the dog ran the squirrel up a tree the dog would begin barking. You would simply find the dog by listen to it bark. A good squirrel dog would follow the squirrel as it went from tree to tree. When you arrived at the tree where the squirrel was you would shoot it with your gun. A twenty-two was better than a shotgun. You could shoot the squirrel better with a shotgun, but if you were too close the many little balls of lead would destroy too much of the squirrel. Also the lead shot would be in various parts of the meat so you might bite down of a piece of lead while eating the meat and break a piece of your tooth.

Another way to hunt squirrel is to go to a tree where there are eating. They like acorns and hickory nuts. You walk quietly up to the tree and watch and listen to their chewing noise and locate the squirrel then shoot it. After shooting it be quiet again until they begin eating then shoot another one and so on until you have killed them all or they have run off.

Bee trees and honey

Bee trees and honey Wild honey bees make their home in hollow trees in the Ozarks Mountains of Arkansas. You can locate a honey tree by finding where the bees get water. I never knew exactly what they were doing with the water some say they drank it other say the use to moisten the nectar that they carry, some people say they do both. However that may be, they leave the water and go in a straight line to the bee tree where they live. Thus the phrase make a bee line for home means go straight home. You pick out the direction they are traveling and pick out a tree or other object in direct line with their travel than walk to that sight and watch until you can find them passing overhead and line them to the nest tree or object then go there and do it all over again until you find the exact tree where they live. You mark the tree and wait until the weather turns cold then come to the tree with saw and ax, cut the tree down and rob the honey. You build a fire under the tree and put stuff that will make a lot of smoke. This helps control the bees and keeps them from sting you in great number.

If you want to save the bees for your own you get protective gear and cut the tree down and find the queen bee an clip her wings so she cannot fly away. The other bees will form a large ball of bees around the queen bee and you simply put the whole ball of bees in a toe sack. Cary them home and transfer the queen bee into the bee hive that you have made with some of the comb of honey. The bees will stay with the queen bee and start making honey in your hive.

My uncle Loy Taylor was the kind of person that bees would almost never sting. He would come home from robbing a bee tree and reach into the toe sack with his bare hands a come out with a large ball of bees on his hand and take the free hand and rake the bees into the hive. Why bees do not sting some people I do not know. There is not honey quite like that from a wild bee hive in a tree.

 Skunk hunting on Sunday meant being sent home on Monday One Sunday afternoon we had company which came home with us from church. The dog was in the woods barking his head off so we decided to go see what he had treed. We arrived to find that he had chased a skunk in a hole in the ground. We decided we would extract the skunk from the hole. After all the dog had done his work we should not slack off on ours. To get a skunk from the hole you take a small long limb about six or seven feet in length and you make a small split in one end and pull it apart enough so that when you push the pole against the skunks fur you can twist the pole and its fur gets caught in the split and you pull it out by it fur. Skunks have a safety feature which

is a very strong odor that can actually make you sick if you get too strong a stream on your person. We could not get the twist pole on the adult skunk so we sharpened the stick and poked it through the hairless babies and retrieved them in that manner. There is really nothing you can do with a baby skunk so all we got for our trouble was a full dose of skunk spray.

We shed our clothes when we got home and bathed in strong soap all to no avail. The scent was there until it wore off. We arrived in school on Monday only to be sent home by the teacher. For some reason she did not like the way we smelled. Image that if you can?

Hog killing day On the farm you did not go to the store when you wanted some meat. There were two reason for that, Number one is you didn’t have the money to buy the meat and number two was that the closest store for that would have meat to sell was 35 miles away and with a wagon pulled by two horses or two mules was a considerable journey. Of course some of our relatives had automobiles and later on we did also but we still did not thing it wise to travel that far for pork when you could kill your own hogs.

            The task of killing hogs was a day’s work. One well placed bullet form a twenty-two would kill the hog in an instance but to butcher the kill was what took time and hard work. In preparation you dug a pit into which you could fit a wood fire and a large metal barrel which was laid on an angle which would still hold water. You had to build a platform in front of the barrel that was large and strong enough to sustain the weight of a 300 to 500 pound hog. Hopefully you had enough sense to kill the hog in close proxsementy to the platform. You also had to build a boom using three strong logs which were tied together with log chain in the form of a teepee. Another strong pole which had to big and strong enough to support the weight of the hog was attached to the teepee logs in the middle and used as a lever. You killed the hog then cut his throat to bleed him. You took a short pole about three feet in length and sharpened the pole on both ends. (The length of the pole was determined by the size of the hog) You ran the sharp ends of the pole thro the hamstring just above the back feet of the hog thus spreading the legs of the hog as far apart as you could. You attached the short pole to the longer pole with a log chain. Using the longer pole as a lever you lifted the hog onto the platform and placed its head toward the open mouth of the barrel. When the water in the barrel was at the right temperature, a learned science, you pushed the hog into the hot water. After a little while you pulled it out a little way and checked to see if the hairs of the hog could be easily pulled out. If not you put the hog back in the water and repeated the exercise. If they could be pulled our easily you rotated the hog so the part not in the water could be treated with the hot water. Then you pulled the hog back on the platform and everybody who could find a spot around the pulled hair as fast as he could before the hair become set and could not be pulled. When the hog was clean of all hair you used the lever to lift the hog and cut its head completely off. Then with it suspended off the ground you placed a number two wash tub under the body and opened the hog from the bottom of the hog from one end to the other and let the insides of the hog fall into the tub. When the job of gutting the hog was finished you then again laid the hog on the platform and began the job of butchering to hog. Feet were usually cleaned and canned to be eaten later. The head could be made into head cheese. The small intestinal tubes could be cleaned and used to stuff pork Sausage into. The meat was usually placed into a smoke house where a small fire was started and green hickory chips were placed because they were green they the chips would smoke more than burn. The original reason for the smoke was to keep flies form laying eggs in the meat and they hatch into maggots and ruin the meat. And of course people grew to love the hickory taste of the meat.

            What I liked best was that we always had fresh pork loins for supper on the day we killed hogs.

Explosion at the wash pot on a wet morning.

Explosion at the wash pot on a wet morning. One of my tasks that I had to do weekly was to draw tubs of water for the weekly wash day and to start a fire under the kettle to heat the water for washing the clothes. This I had to do outside ever week rain, snow or sunshine. The hardest time was when it was raining because it is hard to start a fire out in the open when it is raining.

            One morning all the wood for the wash kettle I could find was wet. I brought coals from the wood stove in the living room and tried to get the wood to burn but I was not having any luck. We had run out of coal oil which to city people it is called kerosene. Kerosene is a liquid that is extracted from coal so country people called it what it is. It is coal oil. It is ideal to work with because it will burn when you put a match to it but it is not volatile.

            I was running out of time because I had to go to school but also had to get thing ready for my mother to do the weekly washing. Then I remembered something my father had told me one time. It must have been the devil that directed my father to tell me this thing because I had never ever considered it before. He said; “Son don’t ever try to start a fire using tractor fuel. It is dangerous.” Bingo! Gas will burn. I can get this fire started with a little bit of gas. I reasoned that I could but some gas in a small open container and stand back and pitch the gas on the coals which I had already placed under the wet wood. I failed to take into account that gas gives off fumes which linger in the air. So when I pitched my gas everything was fine until the hot coals ignited the gas and it exploded and followed the fumes back to me and singed my lashes and eye brows and the front part of my hair. Fire started, lesson learned and I never tried to use gas to start a fire again.

Farm life from a to z and then some

            Making hominy. There are many tasks on the farm that are hard work. There none that I looked forward to more that making hominy. You had to draw tub after tub of water from the well. You had to have a fire outside with a kettle that would hold close to ten gallon of water. You had to shuck a lot of corn and then remove it from the cob. Make sure it was clean and then but it into the pot of boiling water and put lye and ashes into the water with the corn. You then would cook the corn until it would swell up to about four times its usual size. When this happened the outer hard husk on the corn would begin to peel off but not completely. When it had cooked long enough for the husk to be loose you begin with the washing process. All the lye and ashes must be washed from the corn. After the first washing to remove a lot of the lye you begin the next washings and with your hands you rub the corn as it is being washed to remove the hard husk that has been loosened. This is not an easy process but laborious. You continue moving the corn into clean tubs of water until the husks are gone and the lye and ashes are completely removed. Then the corn in put back into a washed out and cleaned kettle and cooked until the corn is done. The process is hard work but the results are a delight. There is nothing like hominy freshly made. That you buy in the store is not even a close second.

 Civic lessons and two pair of pants. In the seventh grade I had a class in civics. One of the assignments was to memorize the pre-emblem to the constitution. That was not a monumental task for someone who could memorize a three act play. However, being seventh graders and thinking that the assignment was over the top the class got together and decided that we would not do the assignment; there were fourteen of us in the class. When the day of the assignment came due no one in the class had memorized the pre-emblem. I think the teacher knew that there was a conspiracy going on so he went ballistic. He said we would have to write the pre-emblem five hundred times. One of us asks and if we don’t write it then what? He said he would give each one of us 20 licks with a paddle on the behind. We got together during recess and all but one girl and two boys decided to take the licks. In fairness to the two boys who did not take the licks of the paddle it was their father’s wrath they feared not the teachers.

            When we made know our decision to the teacher he said he would not spank us all on the same day so his arm would not give out. I was one of the lucky one who got to wait for the second day punishment. I wore two pair of jeans to help cushion the sting of the paddle. It may have helped some but a paddle wielded by a full grown man hitting you behind while you were bent over holding on to your ankles can be felt well enough. I still cannot quote from memory the pre-emblem to the constitution. We the people of the United States in order to perform -------.

The trauma of overalls and modern washing machines. When I first started to school we did not have electricity so my clothes were washed using a number two galvanized wash tub and a rub board. But alas there came the day that the local Tennessee Valley Rural Electrical Association found Witts Springs on their map a came out our way putting in electrical poles and they put one right close to our house. We were on our way to modernity. We had electricity. The first thing we bought was a refrigerator and we now could have ice cream without waiting for a snowy day. Next came an electric washing machine with an electric wringer. It was easier to wring water out of overalls using the wringer than by hand but the rollers that the wringers had could wreck havoc on the metal fastener on the galluses. Herein lay the problem, after several times being washed and ran through the wringer the metal parts became bent and hard to fasten, that is to latch and unlatch. I was in school and needed to go to the bathroom. I ask and received permission to go. By the time I arrived to the outhouse the urge was upon me and I was unable to undo the fastener on the end of the galluses. The end result was that I did my business in my overalls. I could not go back to class after messing in my cloths so I went over the school fence behind the outhouse and went through the woods to our house where I could get help. I do not remember the teacher ever asking what had happened that I did not return to class. It may be that she got busy and did not miss me.

Locking up two classes with one board. Faye Drewry was several years ahead of me in school and gave me grief from time to time. I did not like him because of his pestering and teasing me. He did turn out to be a great adult when he grew up but this event her related was during his school years at Witts Springs High School. Some background information is necessary to understand how the story unfolded. The school did not have indoor plumbing but had two outhouses. One outhouse was for the girls and one for the boys. The girl’s outhouse was located on the north side of the school propriety and the boy’s on the south side. During the time that classes were in secession those needing to go to use the outhouse would raise their hand and when the teacher would recognize them they would ask to be excused. Thus the teacher gave his or her permission for you to leave the room. For some reason which I do not know the teacher would write your name down and the time you left and returned. It may be that they were just trying to keep up with each student since they were in charge of each student. At any rate I ask to be excused and the permission was granted. I went to the outhouse and on returning into the school building; just inside the south entrance of the building I encountered Faye Drewry. There were wood and some lumber lying on the side just inside the door. The wood was for the wood stoves that heated the class rooms. I do not know what the long boards were doing there. Faye looked at me and said, “Kenneth you are a chicken if you do not pick up that long board and place between the two doors.” The two doors opposed each other across the school hall way. I avowed to him that I was not a chicken. We went back and forth for a while, then I picked up the board and jammed it against the two doors which opened in the direction of the hall. The room on the East side housed the 10^th, 11^th, and 12^th grades along with the principal of the school. The room on the West housed the 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd grades.

            I went to my room and promptly forgot what I had done and did to think of the consequence at any time. I had in effect locked six classes into their rooms. I learned latter that in the room where the principle and the upper grades were located one of the students ask for permission to leave and informed the principle that the door would not open. The principal thought him in jest until he tried to open the door and could not get out. He was an elderly man and became quite concerned that the door would not open. The school building itself is or rock construction. This is not fake rock but real rocks only the partitions between the rooms are made of wood. This leaves a small crack between the rock wall and the wood wall. The old gentleman put his head in the corner and began to try to get the attention of the teacher in the adjoining room. His plea was, “Miss Turney, Miss Turney please let us out.” This cry went on and on to no avail, because Miss Turney could not hear him. The high school students were getting a kick out of the whole show. This begging went on until it was time for school to be over then one of the high school boys simply raised a window and jumped down, a distance of about six feet to the ground, and went around to the door and removed the obstruction. Why the principal did not think of this is beyond me. The next day the old gentleman who also was the principal of the school went to each room and got the names of students who had been dismissed from their room at the time he deemed that the board had been placed between the two doors. From my home room there were three of us, J. D. Watts, Sonny Heit and myself. He asked which one of us had placed the board there and Sonny was our advocate. Sonny pleaded our case with a passion avowing that none of us would do such a thing. I simply remained silent and said nothing as Sonny pleaded with success and thus did not receive the thrashing the old gentleman would have administered to me had I owned up to my crime. It was a case of lying by saying nothing.

Cat fighting and fund raising. Small schools have little money so they sometimes need to have money raising events. One way they do this is to hold carnival like events with games that offer small prizes that cost very little. They can charge to play the game and make money. Things like throwing baseballs at pins or darts at balloons are good games that are safe and are an easy way to raise cash for school needs. Once when the Witts Springs School was planning such an event they ask the high schools students for input in to the events which could raise money. Some of the boys came up with the idea of having cat fights. With some persuading they were able to talk the teacher sponsors of the event to proceed with the cat fights. This meant that they had to scour the neighborhoods and farm to find cats that could be used. Most farms have more cats than they need so it was not to difficult to come with a stash of cats. These were put in cages and fed and watered until the event of the carnival. Two tame house cats don’t just natural fight if you put them in a cage together. You need to do something to encourage the combatants. The boys found out if you strung a wire line across the room and tied the tails of the cats together and draped them on the wire the cats would fight each other. They used one of the school rooms and cleared the desks out of the way and charged admission for people to come into the room and watch the fight. It was both a success and a failure. It was a success since it did raise money without costing anything but the work of volunteers. The failure was what they did not take into account. When cats are mad, scared and fighting they urinate. They urinated not a little but a lot. The stench in the room was a major problem. The room was washed, disinfected, scrubbed and rescrubbed with little affect on relieving the smell. The room had to be vacated by the teacher and class and had to be aired out for many weeks before the smell abated enough to be used again. So the first and only cat fight event came and went into the annuals of history at Witts Spring School. 

A long switch and cheating at spelling. Our class room had three grades in one room. This resulted in hearing oral teaching three times. You heard it in the fourth grade. You heard it all over again in the fifth grade and again in the sixth. This sets up the thing that happened in a spelling exercise that was going on in front of the class room. One grade was line up in front of the room and the teacher was giving spelling test in turn to each student. The teacher was named Jo Wasson. She was single and pretty and I loved her and had plans to marry her when I grew up. She kept close discipline when she taught. To help her in the task of discipline she had a long switch which was green and pliable. As she was giving out the words for the students to spell my cousin J. D. Watts was setting on the front row. He decided to help the slower students by mouthing the letters for the students. Jo caught him doing this and gave him a warning to stop doing it. He tried to be more subtle and continued. She caught him a second time and gave him a stronger warning. He keep it up and the next time she caught him she said nothing but turn to him with the long switch in her hand and administered a cut across the neck and the top of his shoulder with the full force of her power. He stopped mouthing words after that. But he made another error in judgment.  He went home and told his daddy what the teacher did to him. For this he received a very hard thrashing from his father.  There was a time when parents expected their children to obey their teachers.

Best friend and fighting siblings. Cranfield McGovern was born December 23, 1936. I was born October 26, 1936 so I was just about two months older than he. We were in the same grade and were great friends. We sometimes got into scuffles but quickly made up. We sometimes would walk with our arms around each other’s neck like little girls might do. My brother Leroy and my sister Wanda would fight with his brother Bruce and his sister Debora. They were older than Cranfield and me. This fighting was often after school on the way home. If I missed a fight he would tell me and I would tell him about the fight he missed. The fact that our brothers and sisters fought did not affect our friendship. One Friday, Cranfield woke up in the middle of the night and asked his older brother for a drink of water. His brother went to get the water and the bucket was empty so his brother went to the spring and got a bucket of water to give him a drink. He went back to sleep and woke up in Heaven. That was on February 9, 1946. He had not been sick so it was not known what caused his death. That was the first time that death touched me up close and personally. Sixty-seven years later I can still remember seeing his freckled face lying in his coffin. 

School stories

            Love and passing notes. When I was in my first years in school I fell in love with a most beautiful girl. I really do no remember if this was in the first, second or third grades. I do know it was the real deal. Her name was Jerri Aday. We had a wonderful letter writing romance that lasted until her parents moved away from our community. The sum total of those deep love words consisted of the words, “I love you. Do you love me?” I have no recollection of any other words that were written but we wrote those words over and over.