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.