My Story

John Eugene Rymer

Born May 21, 1928 - Murray County, Georgia

Preface:

This is my story, it is not my siblings and for the most part not about my siblings, who’s views and memories may vary from mine. It is true as I know it and to a large extent complete. The names of persons are real or in the case of nicknames, the nickname they were known by. I have tried to make it factual based on memories rather than “spin” events.  When the term “Now” is used it refers to the years 2004 and 2005. It is difficult, if not impossible to remember many things in the order in which they happened and to make a logical story of them. You will find this is written in “snippets” of events, without a logical connection, in many cases to the next event. Rather than identify prior events to bring up something that happened later on the same subject you will find a subject may be started and followed through with what happened years later.           

It will be hard for persons reading this later to understand some of the statements without understanding a little about the depression which began in September 1929 when I was one year old and lasted until about 1940 or 41 when producing war materials for the Allies brought the USA out of the depression. For the first decade (1918 - 1928) after the First World War there was a huge expansion in America, factories were working overtime, farm prices were good and the prices of stocks kept rising. Many people thought it would last forever, fortunes were made on borrowed money.  First farm prices became depressed. However, stock prices more than doubled in the four years from 1925 to 1929. In late 1928 or 1929 the supply of goods began to exceed demand,  good inventory controls were not in place. The result was warehouses filled to overflowing with unsold goods and almost overnight many businesses came to the conclusion they had to slow down or stop production. This led to laying off employees no longer needed and the stock market crashed in September 1929 losing more of its value in one day than has happened before or since.

The price of stock kept falling until 1933 or 4. Investors who had borrowed to buy stocks jumped out of windows rather than face ruin. Actions by President Hoover are thought by many that instead of helping they made matters worse. Good data on the number of unemployed was not available; the figure of 25% unemployed at the height of the depression has been used. This was four times what today is considered high unemployment. In the depression era most women did not work, there were no unemployment benefits so when a man lost his job there was no safety net or income for the entire family.

Several years after we moved to Tennessee, Frank got a job at Dixie Foundry in Cleveland making 13 cents per hour. You think this low until you find out we hired Gib Davis part time to help out on the farm, 10 hours on the days he worked for a dollar. The price of license plates for cars was less in Georgia than Tennessee; many people would register their cars in Georgia to save a dollar a year. One of our neighbors in Old Fort bought a new ford in 1934 or 1935, the next year he couldn’t afford a license plate so the car sat unused for two or three years.  And that was the environment, as I knew it the first 12 or 14 years of my life. 

Family Background:

Father’s Family

Grandfather Rymer’s name was John Alexander Rymer. He was a blacksmith by trade and was know as “Black John” Rymer, there being others in the area named John Rymer. He was born February 22, 1830 at Reems Creek in Buncombe county North Carolina. Asheville is in Buncombe country and if my information is correct he was born some 6 - 8 miles north of Asheville.  His father was David Rymer Jr and his mother was Elizabeth who were both born in Buncombe County.

Sometime prior to the Civil War the Rymer family moved to Polk County Tennessee. “Black John” joined the confederate army and was (correct sequence not known) captured, wounded, released at the battle of Vicksburg. Apparently he went AWOL after this as records show he was missing. According to Aunt Lou the wound was by a “spent” bullet that hit him in the shin and bruised the shinbone but did not pierce the skin, it did not heal correctly and gave him a lot of trouble in later life. He died on November 28, 1901 and is buried at Cookenson Creek in Polk County Tennessee. This is 3 or four miles east of the farm where I was raised and where Harry and Kathy live today.

Grandmother Rymer was born Lodaska Epperson on February 22, 1838. We do not know when they were married; she died on September 20^th, 1920. She was born and died in Polk County Tennessee.

They had the following children, all born in Polk County Tennessee:

            Thomas A. Rymer born November 23^rd, 1859  “Uncle Tom” died January  22, 1933

            Laura E. Rymer born December 9^th, 1861

            John Virgil Rymer born 1865 “Uncle Virg”

            Mary Louise Rymer born June 1870 “Aunt Lou” Married Edger J Miles

            Wilford Parkson Rymer born 1875 “Uncle Will” died 1963

            Filetus Dodson Rymer born Februray 11^th, 1878 “Uncle Filetus” died January 31, 1926

            Onie E. Rymer born about 1882 “Aunt Onie” Married Walter S. Love

            Albert Taylor Rymer born June 15, 1886 “Daddy” died February 1^st, 1931

Of these I remember seeing Uncle Tom who owned the farm and lived in the pretty old house by the springs and across the road from where Harry Rymer now lives. My memory is he had a long beard or maybe a mustache. I was only four and a half when he died so this may be in error. He had a daughter Jennie (Jennie’s mother died giving birth) and a second wife “Aunt Susie” who continued to live there for several years after we moved to the farm across the road in Tennessee, she sold the farm to Frank and Blanche Curbow who later sold it to Hobert and Louise Frazier who built a new home on the property, Hobert died but Louise still lives there. Jennie moved to Norwood, Ohio and married Earnie Gray, I think they had one child.

Uncle Will was married to Aunt Mammie, they lived in a small house back in the woods. Both were good musicians with Aunt Mammie having perfect pitch. Uncle Will raised bees for income. In later years Uncle Will became very conservative in his religious views on music, dancing, etc.. Their son Fred who ran Jellico Grocery for years, bought a farm in the area, build a new home for his family and moved Uncle Will and Aunt Mammie in the nice old farm house. Fred also paid money into social security for his parents until they had enough in the plan to draw a monthly check.

 They had an absolutely beautiful “birds eye maple” dining room table, someone must have given it to them, they were poor compared to us.  I remember eating dinner there once, it was beans and cornbread, there may have been other food. Mama never used much seasoning on our food, but Aunt Mammie’s beans were covered with pepper and I could hardly get a bite down.

A family from Miami. Florida, (Ramsey) who were wealthy bought land in the area. Mr. Ramsey and Uncle Will became friends, Mr Ramsey took Uncle Will on several trips to Florida. Both were avid hunters and hunted deer in the Everglades.                       

Aunt Lou was a widow and the mother of Virgil Miles. She owned the farm just south of Harry Rymer’s where her grandchildren and great grandchildren, the Silvers now live. The farm was small and poor, she did not farm but had a garden, a small apple orchard and a number of grape vines. There were several kinds of grapes and the orchard had different kinds of apples. The best in my memory were called “Sweet Apples”, they were fairly small and white and lived up to their name. Aunt Lou lived there alone, she made several loaves of homemade bread on Thursday’s using yeast she kept in a quart jar and fed it potatoes, taking what she needed each week to make the bread and adding water and, when needed potatoes. I remember it fondly spread with peanut butter and jelly, I thought it was manna from heaven. We ate biscuits and cornbread, with rolls only on special occasions at our house.

I remember Aunt Mary, who was the widow of Uncle Virg. She lived in Cleveland with her two daughters, Mary and Gladys, she also had a son Forest (I think) but he did not live with them.  

Mother’s Family:

Frances McCamy Rymer “Mama”

Mary Rymer Dougherty has an extensive amount of background data on the McCamy family. I will not go into the history of the family except for small memories of mamma and her siblings.

As usual, in those days, Grandfather and Grandmother McCamy had a large family. They were, not necessarily in birth order:

             Howard McCamy “Uncle Howard”

            John McCamy “Uncle John”

            Lena McCamy Erwin    “Aunt Lena” called “sister” by mamma and other siblings

            Mattie McCamy Lewis “Aunt Mattie”

            Georgia McCamy Williams “Aunt George”

            Mae McCamy Ayre     “Aunt Mae”

            Frances McCamy Rymer “Mama” called Tod by siblings

            Roberta McCamy Rucker (Later Arrowood) Aunt Rob”

            Frank McCamy  died young, I think at about 4 years of age

 Mama and as far as I know all of her older siblings were born at Peachtree, a small community a few miles east of   Murphy, North Carolina. When she was about 6 months old (probably at the end of the year when farmers generally moved due to the planting and gathering of crops) the family moved to Young Harris, Georgia a distance of some 20 miles. Young Harris college had been started 4 or 5 years before and mama’s parents moved in order for the 5, soon to be 6 daughters to be able to get an education. All of the girls except Aunt Mae, who had some eye problems, graduated from Young Harris.  Aunt Lena and maybe others taught there after they graduated. 

Aunt Lena married Bob Erwin, when we lived in Old Fort they lived in a house across from the Shed Church next to the graveyard in a house that had been built as the church manse in better days. After they grew older they moved to a retirement home in Maryville, Tennessee where their daughter Claudia lived. They had 4 children, Julian, Robert, Claudia and Ralph. Julian ran Kentucky Mine Supply and Robert was a salesman there. Claudia was a nurse. Ralph had various jobs and was a real estate salesman when he retired.

Uncle John never married, he was a businessman and (from stories I believe he) started or help start a number of businesses in the Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia area. Among them was Jellico Grocery company, now the H.T. Hackney Co and Kentucky Mine Supply Company which is still in business and in 2003 had five million in sales and 15 employees. When Kentucky Mine Supply company was started mama and daddy bought some stock for $2,000. All during the depression and later this stock always paid a dividend, I would believe this money was half of more of our entire family’s cash income some years. Uncle John was injured in an elevator accident and was confined to a wheelchair. He built a nice house some 2 or 300 yards north of the house where I was born and lived there with Grandma McCamy and Aunt Mae. He lost all of his money in the depression and died about the time I was born.

 Uncle Howard was also a businessman, I am not aware of his businesses except he ran a company named Moore-Rogon (sp) Dry Goods. He also owned the farm where my father was manager and we lived when I was born. He and his wife had two daughters.

 Aunt Mattie married Albert Lewis who was a M.D. and the company doctor for Tennessee Copper Company at Copperhill, Tennessee. I can remember four children; Milton, George, Dorothy and Johnnie, there may have been others. Milton was superindent of Tennessee Copper Company for many years. Both of the girls were teachers.

 Aunt George married C. P. Williams who was, I believe, Secretary and Treasurer of Lincoln Memorial University (LMU) which in 2004-05 year has over 2,500 students, almost evenly split between undergraduate and graduate students. They had four sons; Dick, Howard, Pat and ???. Pat was a air force pilot and was killed during World War II. Howard became vice-president of New England Life Insurance company

 Aunt Mae married Clayton (?) Ayre who was in charge of building the flume line on the Ocoee River,  he was murdered (circa 1913) during the construction. They had one son, Frank. Aunt Mae and Frank, who as about 18,  lived with Grandma McCamy when I can first remember.

 Aunt Rob married Ben Rucker, he was an educator. He held several jobs in the Knoxville school system. Superintendent of Schools was one of them. If the information was correct and I remember correctly he was both Superintendent of Schools and principal of one or two schools at the same time. They had one son Ben, an army officer during World War II and was killed at the Battle of the Bulge. Uncle Ben died and Aunt Rob later married Claude Arrowwood.

 Mama married Daddy on May 31^st, 1912. Daddy was working building the flume line on the Ocoee River when Frank was born on March 17, 1913. He later became a farmer and was managing the farm owned by Uncle Howard when he died in 1931.

 Children:

            Frank Albert Rymer                               March 17^th, 1913

            Sue Ladoska Rymer Reed                       October 1914

            Elizabeth Frances Rymer Blair            March 4^th, 1919

            Onie Louise Rymer Miller                     June 9^th, 1921

            Mary McCamy Rymer Dougherty        June 12^th, 1926

            John Eugene Rymer                                May 21^st, 1928

            Robert “Bob” Howard Rymer               January 31^st, 1931

  Daddy died the day after “Bob” was born.

 A short history of the McCamy family taken off the Internet attached as appendix “A”

 Area and Transportation History:

 To better understand some of the times in my life that follows it helps to have a little understanding of the area and transportation when I was a child.

 According to a book on Copperhill and the copper basin, copper was discovered around 1810 as high grade copper ore lying around on the ground. The ore was extracted by cutting trees, piling them up and making a big bonfire, throwing the chunks of ore on top of the fire and picking the copper which melted out of the ore out of the ashes. The ore was full of sulfur and formed sulfuric acid which was discharged into the air. The air became so acidic that all new plant life was killed and only mature trees where left standing. Over the years all of the mature trees in the copper basin were cut to smelt the copper ore. Needless to say this created an erosion problem. The copper was carried out of the mountains following the Ocoee river gorge and then to Cleveland by wagon, a hard  week’s work was a round trip for a wagon, driver and team of horses or mules. On the return trip the wagons brought back food and other supplies. There was a railroad at Cleveland some time prior to the Civil War for shipping the copper.

 Some time between the Civil War and 1900 the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company (L&N) built a railroad from Knoxville to Atlanta via Copperhill. From Knoxville to Etowah the railroad followed the fairly level terrain west of the foothills, at Etowah it began the trip up the mountain to Copperhill a vertical distance of several hundred feet. Once this was completed copper could be loaded onto the railroad at the copper plants, eliminating the long trips to Cleveland. This worked great for the copper and supplies coming into Copperhill. It was a very long and expensive way to transport goods from Knoxville to Atlanta or Atlanta to Knoxville. As the amount of traffic between the two points increased there was a need, so about 1900 the L&N begin building a much straighter and easier travel west of the foothills from Etowah to Atlanta. This new railroad was adjacent to the road, and probably within 100 feet from the house where  we lived on in Georgia. It was a main line and trains went through at all hours. Hearing the whistles and noise of the trains put me to sleep when I was a child and I found them comforting and an aid to sleep until long after I became an adult.

 Because railroads were the main source of transportation they had frequent stations with a station master, usually less but probably no more than 10 miles apart. In addition they also some stops without a station other than a small building where you could stay and flag down certain trains and/or boxes of freight would be dropped off. One of these small buildings and a sidetrack was across from grandma’s house. There was a train we called the “Short Dog” that went south in the morning and north in the afternoon. The Short Dog was a local, it dropped off and picked up full carloads of freight along the way, it also had a baggage car which would drop off and pick up cartons or boxes and a passenger car where one could ride. It is hazy but the baggage car and the passenger car may have been parts of the same car. The depression and better roads killed off the Short Dog, I don’t remember it after we moved to Tennessee.

 There were two or so passenger trains going each way every day, these kept to a reasonably accurate schedule and to country people they were known by the approximate time they went by each day, there was the “four o’clock” train etc.. There were few ways to obtain the accurate time, these were about as good as anything else we had. These were all steam engine with steam and smoke from the coal fire coming out of the smokestack. Steam engines needed to get water for the boiler frequently, there was a water tower at Ocoee where trains would stop to get water. There was a spring with a little pump house about three quarters of a mile south of the water tower. When the water in the tower got low someone had the job of firing up the little steam engine in the pump house for an hour or so until the tank was refilled. Diesel engines replaced the steam engines about 1940.

 A few months before we moved to Tennessee there was great excitement, Greyhound Bus Lines was starting daily bus service between Knoxville and Atlanta. For those who lived on the hwy this was like taxi service, you could flag down the bus in front of your house and stop it at your friends house or a store you wanted to visit. The minimum fare was 25 cents and you could ride a long way for a quarter. After Frank married and left home, I was about 12 at the time, we were dependent on friends and family or the Greyhound bus to go anywhere except school. Greyhound Bus Lines probably had something to do with the demise of the Short Dog.

 The road in front of our house in Georgia was a 2 lane dirt road. It was also the main road between Cartersville, Georgia to Maryvillle, Tennessee. It was almost a straight shot between the two points and ran just west of the foothills. When roads were given numbers it became US Highway 411, and will be referred to as “the hwy” because of the importance it played in our lives. When I first remember the hwy was paved with concrete in Tennessee, you could tell immediately when you got to the state line. I mentioned copper was transported down the Ocoee river gorge in wagons. In the early 1900's Tennessee Power Company begin building the dam on the Ocoee River which we called Parksville and now known as Ocoee Number 1. When this dam was completed, the lake covered the road and there was no direct path from Copperhill to Cleveland. Aunt George’s husband Uncle C. P. laid out a dirt road across the mountain that connected the copper basin to a road between Reliance and the lake, it was known as the Kinsey highway. From about 1910 to 1932 the way to get from Copperhill to anywhere west except by train was by going through Reliance and down the Hiwassee river gorge to the edge of the mountains. In 1932 the road from Copperhill to Ocoee opened. The road around the lake was full of sharp curves and was known as the water level highway, today it is US Highway 64.  

 Before the Tennessee Power Company began to build the Parksville dam, roads were poor and the L&N railroad finished building a direct line from Etowah, Tennessee to Atlanta, Georgia - eliminating the trip through Copperhill for through traffic. The power company built a railroad line from the L&N railroad to the Parksville dam site to carry materials.  This was known as the Parksville Railroad. They also built a coal burning steam plant to make additional power during periods of high usage or when a drought reduced the amount of water available. The crossties on the Parksville railroad had a heavy nail, about one-quarter of an inch in diameter and three inches long in the middle of each crosstie. The interesting thing was the head of the nail had the year the crosstie was installed on it. What would they be worth on eBay today? 

 The first years we lived in Tennessee were the worst of the depression there was little demand for electric power and the steam plant at Parksville was not used.  When the steam plant was to be started, our neighbor, Dewey Mercer who was always in charge of maintaining the railroad would get a crew a few days before start up to trim the right of way and make other repairs as needed. The steam plant at Parksville burned about two railroad carloads of coal per day when it was in operation. The first years we lived in Tennessee the Parksville railroad used a small steam engine which, from the looks of it, had been purchased about 1900, it was known locally as “The Dinky”. It had a tall smokestack and looked more like the steam engines you see in western movies than the more modern engines used on the L&N. Monday through Friday the L&N would drop off three carloads of coal. About 11:00 am the Dinky would show up pulling the empty coal cars from the day before leaving them on the side track and then going to the L&N to get the full coal cars. The full cars would then be taken to the other end of the side track and the empty cars moved to the L&N siding to be picked up. This probably took forty-five minutes to an hour. As there was no place to turn the Dinky around, it backed from Parksville to the L&N and ran forward from the L&N to Parksville. Several years after the TVA bought the Tennessee Power Company the Dinky was replaced with a diesel switch engine. Still later the steam plant, which was very inefficient was torn down, the switch engine sold and the rails were taken up and sold as scrap.

 The Georgia Years:

 It was August and hot in Georgia. The house was set back from the west side of dirt road about 100 feet, guarded by 2 large maple trees on each side of the concrete walk to the road. From the front porch you could look east across the road, the adjacent L& N Railroad tracks, past the barn and outbuildings to the floodplain and creek to the field nestled close to the first foothill of the southern Appalachian mountains. All morning the farmer could be seen behind his mule plowing the field of corn. At noon he came home to “dinner” and said about two more hours of plowing and he would have the crop “Laid By”, no more work in the fields until it was time for the harvest. Afterwards, he took some clean clothes when he went back to work and left them on the footlog across the creek. When he finished plowing and started back to the barn he left the mule in the creek to get a drink, took off his clothes and bathed in the creek putting on the clean clothes afterward. Putting the mule and plow away the weary farmer returned to the house. Late that afternoon there was a thunderstorm, the rain cooled the hot air. That night he lay with his wife, nine months later on May 21^st, 1928 I was born. 

 I don’t remember it but was told that when about 13 months old the girls were jumping off the porch, tried to follow them and broke my arm. I would believe it was my right arm, although I am right handed I have always seemed to have better motor control with my left. I was also told one of my eardrums ruptured when I was very young. I was told I was a Daddy’s boy and wanted to follow him everywhere, even to the field on the big Fordson tractor with the steel wheels and he would let me ride with him, when I fell asleep he would hold me on the tractor fender with one hand and drive with the other.

 I vaguely remember being told than I had a baby brother when Bob was born and the next day that daddy had died. I remember seeing the closed coffin, if memory serves me right it was brought to the house. I would be 3 years old in May. Thinking back 74 years later I know I would have been a different person if my father had lived. I would like to think I would not have grown up to be almost a hermit and a loner who seldom became close to those around me.

 After daddy died Frank did his best to run the farm, be a father to 6 kids and everything else that needed to be done. A few years before he died he said, ”it was hard”, an understatement if there was ever one.

 Mama had a hard life, they were living in a cabin where Goforth creek comes into the Ocoee river when Frank was born which is remote even today. Daddy was working helping to build the flume line, the big box build on the side of the mountain where the river was diverted to make power at what we called Caney Creek and is now known as Ocoee #2 powerhouse. Becoming a farm wife, having six more children and then a widow all by age 40 is hard. She had two things going for her; a deep faith in God and a college education from Young-Harris College. Both served her well in the dark days ahead. If she complained about the life she was given it was well hidden from me, it was just the way it was. When I was growing up she got up at 4 am, started a fire in the kitchen stove and another in living room the winter, milked two cows, fixed breakfast and got us off to school. Somehow, she and Frank made short ends meet around large needs. In summer gathering vegetables, preparing them and canning them in a kitchen with the wood fire going and probably over 100 degrees many days was not a job many would care for. Building a fire under a pot of water in the yard, washing the dirty clothes in it, wringing them out by hand and hanging them on the line to dry was not to be looked forward to on the best days and considerably less in the winter. Putting up with me was only one additional burden.

 Cream was skimmed off the milk and saved in a churn, a pottery crock that held about three gallons. A churn had three parts, the crock, the dasher and the top. The dasher was a stick about like a short broomstick with two short pieces of wood attached at the bottom of the handle to form a cross. There was a hole drilled in each end of the cross. The top was round and fit into a recess at the top of the crock, it had a hole in the middle for the dasher handle to go through. To make butter you moved the dasher up and down, up and down until the cream had turned into lumps of butter floating on the top. After the butter was taken out the remainder was buttermilk with specks of butter. It was much better than the stuff you buy in stores. 

 Regardless how poor we were, how short money was I don’t remember mama not taking The Chattanooga Times daily newspaper and reading it from cover to cover. It was our only source of news except gossip or what some neighbor told us. We had no electricity, no telephone, no running water and no radio. After World War II started, mama bought a battery powered radio and with a long antenna could get several stations. The batteries were so expensive it was only allowed on to watch the news, anything else was a special occasion.

 Mama was strict; she determined who we could play with and when. Most of the time we were too busy to have much play time, we did not work on Sundays except to milk the cows and feed the hogs and other animals. This did not mean we were allowed to go off to a friends house to play. Sometimes we were but often we were not. Friends about my age in the neighborhood included: Edward (“Punk”) and Roger Oneal who lived between our house and the hwy, Edward and Junior Lea who lived on Horns Creek road and who’s father had the mill where the corn was ground into meal, Clarence and Terry Mercer, Clyde and Melvin Bain. The Mercer’s and the Bain’s lived on Old Federal road.

 It was the darkest days of the depression, Herbert Hoover was president and there was mama with 7 children as tenants on a  farm. Frank, the oldest, who was 17 was suddenly put into a role nobody should have at that age. Because there was no school bus service the older children spent the week in Eton, probably 7 or 8 miles south of where we lived and where there was a high school, they came home on the weekends.    

 It turned out that Aunt Rob and Uncle Ben had loaned money to Uncle Howard for the farm and Uncle Howard could not make the payments so they foreclosed and now Aunt Rob and Uncle Ben owned the farm. I am not sure when this took place but it was between 1930 and 1934.

 Some good things happened in 1933, mama got a job teaching at Hall’s Chapel a one room Baptist Church which doubled as a school and was across the field from where we lived, (probably 1 and a half miles by road) I think it paid $15.00 per month and school was for maybe 6 months. There was another teacher who’s name I have forgotten, together they taught grades 1 through 8. I learned to read early and could read when I was 4. I was 5 years old and went to first grade at Hall’s Chapel. Roosevelt was president and one of his first successes was to pass a bill making low cost loans available for buying farms and perhaps other property. The interest rate was 2 percent and the loans were for thirty years. Mama got one of these loans of $2,000.00 to buy a house and 55 acres from Aunt Lena and Uncle Bob. This is the farm at Old Fort, Tennessee where I was raised and where Harry Rymer lives today and raises chickens. Frank and maybe the older girls moved into the house at Old Fort on January 1, 1934. Mama and the younger children stayed in Georgia until school was out, then we completed our move to Old Fort.

 Before school started at Hall’s Chapel someone had cut down the bushes around the school with a briar scythe leaving sharp stakes, or stobs as we called them, in the ground, some of the kids running around barefooted would step on them really hurting themselves. I don’t remember much about Hall’s Chapel but I remember the day before we got out for Christmas. It was a nice day and at the afternoon recess we all went outside to play. When we came back in and were seated the fire door in the ceiling opened, a rope ladder dropped down and Santa Claus climbed down the rope ladder with a bag of goodies on his back. That got my attention, I can tell you. My friend in the first grade was named Lindberg Green, the only other kid I can remember was Tommy Pickles, Tommy’s father was a tenant farmer on our (Uncle Ben’s) farm and did not believe education was necessary so Tommy did not go to school.

 Hall’s Chapel was on the uphill side of the road, across on the downhill side was a good spring (where we got water to drink) a house and some outbuildings. A man named Lee Leford lived there with his family, his claim to fame was he had killed someone at the spring one day (I think Elizabeth was in school there the day it happened) and had served time in jail.  Several years ago Beverly and I rode by Hall’s Chapel, if the building was there it was so grown up you could not see it, I only recognized where it was by the spring and Ledford house. After we moved to Tennessee, Aunt Rob and Uncle Ben moved into the house we had lived in and gave a corner of their property for a church, a new brick church was built on the property and services were discontinued at the old Hall’s Chapel church.

 The house where we lived in Georgia was a typical farmhouse of the period with a big wraparound porch on the east, south and a part of the west side. There was a room on the north side of the house which on cold days in the winter would sweat, the inside wall of the room would be covered with moisture.  At the back of the house attached to the kitchen was a covered screened porch 10 feet or so square with a concrete floor. In the middle was a well where we got our water, there was no plumbing in the house. When the cabbage in the garden were ready a open box consisting of 4,  6 or 8 inch boards about 2 feet long was set up on the concrete floor. Cabbage was placed in the box and a hoe like tool was used to chop it up into small pieces which were packed in ceramic jars holding maybe 5 gallons each. I don’t know the process, and don’t remember if it was later canned but the cabbage became sauerkraut which was served throughout the year.

 The outhouse was out back, reached by going through the kitchen and porch with the well and up a slight rise, maybe 50 feet or more from the house. It was a fine outhouse, built by my father, with 4 holes - at least one of them was smaller than normal for the little kids to use. Seems like it was the one on the left. We had a few geese and a gander running around. The gander liked nothing better than to nip at little kids. One day I needed to go to the outhouse and here was the gander standing in the path, well I wasn’t let that bother me, I grabbed a stick of some kind and was going to show him who was boss around here.  Out I went, up came the gander, taking a mighty swing at him, he ducked and the stick flew out of my hands. The gander got me good and I went crying in the house to mama.

 North of us up the road about 300 yards was the house Uncle John had built and where grandma McCamy and Aunt Mae lived. It was a nice house and the only I one I remember that was stucco on the outside. Inside was a wide staircase in the middle with a wide hall going around it. The rooms, at least some of them, had a brass rail about a foot below the ceiling to hang pictures on. The ceilings must have been 9 feet. There were a number of pictures in the house. The ones I remember were mostly of bird dogs, some with a bird in their mouth. Uncle John after his injury had been confined to a wheel chair which grandma used sometimes. We kids loved to get in the chair and have someone push us around and around the stairwell. One day we found the wheelchair next to the kitchen and were going around the stairwell having great fun when grandma came out of the kitchen and yelled at us good, she had left the chair there, it would not go through the kitchen door, while she was cooking.

 The farm in Georgia had been in the McCamy family since about 1830. I would believe that Uncle John owned it before Uncle Howard. The reason for this is behind our house was a small house built to hold a Delco plant, (I may be wrong about this it may have been behind grandma’s house). Delco plants consisted of a gasoline engine attached to a generator and a number of batteries. The batteries were in about 2 gallon rectangle shaped glass jars, each battery put out 2 volts. The voltage put out by Delco plants was determined by the number of batteries, most of them had 16 batteries. It worked by using the generator to charge the batteries then using the power of the batteries to run lights, etc.. These were widely used by well to do people in rural areas in the 1920's. The Delco plant, when it worked, powered (both ours ???) and grandmas house. I do not remember it ever working, I think it was because there was no money to pay for gas and maintenance..

 One of the things we had as a cash crop was to grow sweet potato “slips” and sell them to others in the neighborhood. I vaguely remember it. In early spring the bed would be prepared by laying out some logs into a long rectangle maybe 100 feet by 4 feet, then placing sawdust several inches deep inside. The sweet potatoes were placed in the sawdust and the whole thing covered with a thin cloth that allowed rain and light in but prevented frost on cold nights. When the new plants were some 6 to 8 inches high they would be pulled off and planted in our field or sold to others to plant in their fields.

 About once a year Aunt George and Uncle C.P. would come to visit grandma, LMU had a huge Lincoln car, on the back of the front seats were little seats that folded down to make room for more people to ride, it had cigarette lighters, we thought it was pretty cool That was the car they came in, always bringing a 5 pound box of Whitman’s Sampler chocolate to mama which were doled out for several months.

 I remember two McCamy family picnics; one was to Fort Mountain and the other to Cohutta Springs. Fort mountain got it’s name from the fact there is a fort of rocks near the top made by pre-historic people. The rocks are piled up several feet high in a line maybe 20 feet across with depressions for people to hide in. From the view I thought I could see our house several miles away, maybe it was visible, who knows. Someone brought pineapple sandwiches made with bakery “light” bread. I can still remember how good they were.  

 The second picnic was at Cohutta Springs was at Coffee’s mill not long after it was finished. The Coffee’s had damned up a small creek and used the water to run a water powered mill to grind corn and wheat. I was a pain to everybody asking permission to do this and that. There must have been 30 or so people there and I met people I probably haven’t thought about since.

 South of our house (in Georgia) about 2 miles there was a road headed east toward the mountains, turning on this road and going about half a mile on the top on a small hill was Summerhour Methodist Church which our family attended. I don’t remember much about going there. East of the church was the old cemetery where grandma and grandpa McCamy along with many others of their kin are buried. South of the church and across the road was the new cemetery where my father was buried, we were asked and made a donation to establish a fund to keep the cemeteries cleaned off. Mama wanted to be buried next to her husband and there was no room, so many years later she had the body moved to Benton, Tennessee so she could be buried next to daddy.

 A number of years ago there was a violent storm that turned the church on its foundation, rather than repair the church it was sold to another denomination who changed the name.

 There was a creek running through the farm, probably about 30 feet from bank to bank with pools maybe 3 or 4 feet deep. The pools were created by what we called “slick rocks” which when wet were almost like ice. I know now they were limestone and slick rocks was merely a description. In the summer we would go swimming in the larger pools. There was one or more “cane breaks” where canes used for fishing poles grew, I was warned to stay away from them because rattlesnakes hung around them. I loved to fish and went fishing in the creek whenever possible, one day I was fishing and was late for dinner, the others were eating when I came into the house. I had caught a minnow of some kind 4 or maybe 5 inches long, since the others were already eating I decided to have my own lunch and cook my fish. I put a big gob of butter in its mouth and put it in a frying pan - no scaling, no cleaning or anything. Somebody stopped me and fed me what everybody else was eating. A few months ago I was at my friend Stell Huie’s house, Stell is an avid trout fisherman, he had a map of the trout streams in Georgia. There was our creek labeled a class 1 trout stream and I thought it only had minnows in it.

 On both sides of the creek was a flood plain which was kept in pasture or hay. The flood plain was full of rocks from 6 to 10 inches worn round  by water at some past age. The Indians had camped here and you could find arrowheads and other artifacts.  

 South of the house and a few feet further from the road was the garage. I only remember there was wood for the stoves along the wall closest to the house. It seems it had some storage space and maybe a loft. Daddy had bought a new A Model Ford shortly after I was born, I have no idea how we all got into it at one time. It was stored in the garage when not in use. We kept it about 10 or 12  years and sold it to Emerson White after we moved to Tennessee for $35.

 Across the road and railroad track was the barn and outbuildings. If I remember correctly there was a building with a drive through in the middle, on the west side was a storage room for grain. I remember it containing wheat before it was sold or ground into flour. The interior walls and perhaps the floor were not solid to allow  the grain to dry faster. There was a screen wire of some sort to keep the grain from falling out, also to keep mice and rats out. There a barn where the cows were milked and stock was kept. A few feet from the barn was a small spring and spring branch, the water was so pure the branch was covered with watercress which requires very pure water to grow. There was another barn south of the above buildings maybe 300 yards and away from any houses. This was the days when there were a lot of hobos riding the trains that went by the barn. It was not unusual for hobos to sleep in the hay. I remember Frank Ayre was down there one day and found a knife with a 5 or 6 inch blade lost by someone sleeping in the hay.

 One day I was at grandma’s out in the front yard, there was a tree by the railroad tracks which had no leaves on it at that time and heard a noise, there was a large number of small planes flying south. In my memory they flew through the branches of the tree, I know they flew so that in my viewing angle they appeared to be flying through the branches. Many years later I read it was a training mission for the Air Corps flying from Knoxville to Atlanta by following the railroad tracks and it was almost the entire fleet of Army airplanes.

 The property adjoining grandma’s house on the north contained a small rural store, which were common then, owned and run by Miss Lelia Harris (I think). The depression, better roads and transportation worked to put Miss Harris and thousands of others out of business. However, if you had a penny you could buy some candy when she was open. Next to the Harris store was a beautiful old house and  farm owned by Frank Hall who had never married and never attended church. The Harris’s and the Hall’s may have been related. When Frank Hall died, after we moved to Tennessee, he left all of his property to the church. The church had big letters painted  on the end of the barn, “Harris - Hall Memorial”.

 Next to Frank Hall’s farm, a half mile or so from our house, was a new log cabin. I am not sure if I can remember it being finished. It was the new home of Claude and Lucille Arrowwood and children; Raymond, Kendall known as “Bid” and Eloise. Bid was a year or so older than me, Eloise was a little younger and when I was about 4 thought she was pretty cute. It was known, even to me, that Claude and Lucille did not “get along”. Claude was a very competent craftsman, he built the log cabin himself and later was in charge of a Civilian Conservation Camp (CCC). All I remember about Lucille was that she was heavy maybe even obese. Years later and I know nothing about the circumstances, Claude married Aunt Rob and they moved to Lakemont, Georgia about 30 miles from where we live in Highlands, North Carolina. Beverly and I visited them a couple or so times in Lakemont. Claude had made a grandfather clock, age had cost him his skills, it did not show any of the fine craftsmanship of his earlier work.

 We move to Tennessee:

 After school was out at Hall’s Chapel, mama and the younger children moved to the farm at Old Fort Tennessee. I would be 6 in May and had finished the first grade. This was a move of about 15 miles, I don’t remember much about it, I assume the household furnishings, tools, etc. were moved by horse and wagon, about a two day round trip as there were very few trucks at that time.

 When we lived in Georgia we were on the hwy, when we moved our house was on a dirt road roughly parallel and about one half mile to the east of the hwy. The L&N railroad was between the road we were on and the hwy so I could still enjoy listening to the trains at night. In Tennessee the hwy was paved and wonder of wonders, there was electric lines along side providing power to those who were lucky enough to live on the hwy and who had the money to pay for it. Even more wonderful was the fact there were also telephone lines and telephones for those with money.

 A little about the neighborhood, the road we lived on is now known as Swan Road. Going north from the house down the hill across the creek and up past the Parksville Railroad then on past Ellie and Dewy Mercer’s, Beech Springs Baptist Church, “Cheat” and Maggie Oneal’s through the underpass of the L&N and out to the hwy, a distance of about a mile. There is a fork in the road between the Parksville Railroad and the Mercers, the road goes east for some three quarters of a mile where it intersects with the Old Federal road, then continues across Sand Mountain and into a community known as Horns Creek. This road is named Horns Creek road. The north end of Old Federal road is at a junction with US 64, east of Ocoee, it continues south for 4 or 5 miles and then turns west, intersects with Swan road at the Blue Ridge Baptist Church continuing to the hwy. The road continues on but the name has changed from Old Federal.  From our house south Swan road continues some 3 or 4 miles when it turns west and ends at the hwy near the site of the Old Fort. The road got its name from the Swan family farm and house which was at the southern end of the road. The hwy, Swan road and Old Federal road are basically parallel except where they turn west to join the hwy. Old Federal road crosses Swan road at the Tennessee Valley Divide, water to the north flow into the Tennessee and Mississippi  rivers and water to south flows into the Conasaga river and reaches the Gulf of Mexico at Mobile, Alabama. As this divide is a high point there is no way around it, steam engines pulling loaded freight trains slowed down to almost walking speed before they got over the hump.

 The dirt road was dusty in dry weather and muddy with sticky red mud when wet. The dust wasn’t much of a problem for years, normally there was only one car a day, the mailman who got a new Plymouth every year. The mud was more of a problem, we had to walk down the hill and across the creek and on to the school bus. At best we would come home from school with mud maybe not all over but much more than needed. During heavy rains the creek would rise until it was out of its banks and over the road, the only way home was to wade through the water sometimes 8 or so inches deep. As with all dirt roads there were mudholes, the ones along the creek were especially bad and when covered with water you had to be careful the way you walked.

 The house and 40 by 60 foot barn had been built by I. S. McCash, the initials “I. S. Mc” and “1877" were cut out of the boards at the end of the barn.  I have heard Mr. McCash was a Yankee carpetbagger. I do not know whether the house or barn were finished first. The barn frame was made of hand hewn beams about 8 by 12 inch some of them 40 feet long. It had three stories, with the bottom a semi basement open on two sides for stables and chickens. The main floor had some stables a tack room and a place to keep hay. There were openings above the stables on the lower floor where you could drop hay directly into the stable. The middle of the main floor was open so you could drive horses and a wagon in.  The upper floor was a hay loft, you would drive a wagon load of hay into the barn then unload to one of the areas for hay. We are talking of loose hay not bales as we see today. 

 The house had been a very nice home in its day but Uncle Bob had let it run down. Originally it had been a “T” shaped house. A front porch with a door in the middle leading into a hallway with the stairs on one side. A room on either side of the hallway/stairs and the third room at the end. Each of these rooms had a wood burning fireplace. It was really a one and a half story house. The upstairs had a room over each of the downstairs rooms, these were much smaller due to the slope of the roof taking about half of the width. The roof over the front porch was flat and was accessed through a door in the upstairs hall. Later a room was added to the rear of the house for a kitchen. A room had also added to the north side of the house, mama used it as her bedroom, it has now been turned into a bathroom.  Since Harry and Kathy Rymer have lived there they had the room at the end of the hall and the kitchen into a single large room. When we moved except for a few chips of paint here and there on the siding you would not have known it had ever been painted.  The inside walls were wood lathe covered with plaster containing horsehair to hold it together. Some of the plaster was cracked or missing.

 If my memory of what was told me is correct grandpa and grandma McCamy had owned the house and farm before Aunt Lena and Uncle Bob and mama and her parents were living there and mama was married in the living room. Mama was teaching at a one room school at the bottom of the hill at the time.

 The farm was a “Dry” farm meaning it had no creeks or other running water. We had bought a part of Uncle Bob and Aunt Lena’s farm, Uncle Bob keeping about thirty acres, the part with the creek, several acres of which were the floodplain for the creek.  There was also, except as follows later, no wells. This meant that all water had to be gotten off the roof of the house and barn and stored in cisterns or carried in. The property east of the house sloped down into a small valley with a naturally formed drainage “gully” in the middle, during wet weather there was water in the gully and sometimes it ran like a small creek.  From before I was 6 until after I left home we only had cistern water to bath, wash, cook and drink. At the end of a hot, dry summer cistern water can not only be scarce but it isn’t too healthy and doesn’t taste all that red hot. There was a good spring at Uncle Tom’s and sometimes someone would walk down with an empty bucket and come back with a one full of good, cold spring water. The lack of other sources of water meant we had to draw water from the barn cistern for the animals, a thirsty mule or horse can drink several bucketfuls at one time and we had two mules and a few cows. Several years after we moved there, I think I must have been 13 or 14 we obtained title or got an easement to a small strip of land from Uncle Bob that allowed us to build a lane to the creek, now the animals could get water without drawing it.

 As far as I know Uncle Bob (or somebody) had built a shed on the site of the barn and installed a Delco plant, wired the house for electricity and installed some plumbing. In order to find  water, attempts around the house resulted in dry holes, a well was dug and  pipe and wiring run and a pump installed at the bottom of the pasture some 200 yards from the house. Before we moved the Delco plant was not working, the wiring to the house and pump had been removed, rolled up and stored in the Delco plant shed. While I knew where the well was, I never saw a bucket of water drawn from it. We did our part to the World War II war effort by giving the heavy copper wire in the Delco plant shed to be reused.   

 One of the delights to me of our new home in Tennessee was the upstairs hall. I don’t know where they came from but there was a small bookshelf and a number of books. By the time I was 6 I could read fairly well and by 10 was reading everything in sight. On rainy days I would sit in the hall and read the books. No one young boy today has read “Harry Potter” books with more excitement and anticipation than I had when reading books like, “Tom Swift and the City of Gold”. There was a copy of “Beowulf” (sp) the first known poem, which I read with great interest and I believe more understanding than if I read it today. I read Shakespeare with great gusto, laughing and shouting at the fun that was taking place. It was a magic place and it was all mine.  

 I started school at Ocoee Grammar School when it opened, I was 6 years old and in the second grade. We rode the school bus which came only as far as the Parksville railroad and turned around. Other years the school bus came down Horns Creek road and we walked the extra distance, there was a log cabin where we waited, sometimes on cold mornings we would be invited in to warm up by the fire. There was not much need to keep a sharp lookout for the school bus we could hear it coming, the people who lived there never closed the front door. During my high school years we caught the bus at the hwy, sometimes walking on the L&N railroad and then the Parksville railroad tracks on the way home.

 Ocoee Grammar School was a large, square, wooden building. It had a partial basement where the first and second grades classes were held. The basement stairs were outside and covered with a roof, there were probably not more than 6 concrete steps needed as the rest of the school was some 3 or 4 feet above ground. The first floor contained 4 classrooms and 2 bathrooms in addition to a wide hallway and stairwells to go to the top floor. The top floor consisted of a large room with a stage, a classroom and the library which was in an alcove under the roof. The large room was used for assemblies, classes and other activities. Other activities I remember was probably one or twice a year a traveling group would put on a show during the school hours, many if not all of these were educational in nature.

 There would be shows at night in the large room, many of these were musical groups who had a show called the Mid-Day Merry Go Round on KNOX in Knoxville and spent half their time telling was schools they would be appearing at the next week or two. Some of them went on to become big country stars; one was Roy Acuff and another played “Grandpappy” who later was a star in the TV series “Hee Haw”. School plays and other local meetings also used the large room at  night.

 In many ways Ocoee school was a cut or so above Hall’s Chapel. We had classrooms instead of 8 grades being together in one room. We had electric lights, indoor toilets, running water where we could wash our hands and fountains where we could get a drink. I had Miss Pearl Hutsel (sp) as a teacher.  Miss Hutsel lived with her parents on a farm a little north of Ocoee, her father had some milk cows and mostly raised feed for the cows. So ended the second grade and the basement classroom.

 I don’t remember much about Ocoee grammar school. Other teachers I remember were; Mrs Williams - a relative of Sue’s husband Herbert, and Herlien (sp) McCamy, a distant relative. I owe a debt of graditude to my 4^th grade teacher, even if I can’t recall her name, for teaching me to read with my mouth closed. While I read all the time, I pronounced each word silently with my mouth prior to this. Some of the events I remember are the time it was winter and there had been a lot of rain which made a pond on the lower part of the school ground, the pond was frozen over - some of the kids tried skating and broke through. Another time there was ice on the road from snow packed down by cars and trucks. Kids would run then slide of maybe 40 or 50 feet. I had Herlien as a teacher when I was in the sixth or seventh grade, one day Wilma Stephenson brought a rattlesnake rattle to school that had 32 rattles. That afternoon Herlien left the room for a few minutes, one of the kids crawled under her desk and when she returned he shook the rattle good just as she started to sit down. She later told mama she thought she was going to have a heart attack.

 The way to go from Ocoee to Parksville was by the front of the school. We did not get many or any “field trips”, but one day we got one, they were completing a section of  US 64 which included the overpass over the L&N and the hwy and routing Ocoee to Parksville traffic away from the front of the school. We walked over to the back edge of the school ground and watch them pave US 64, I think I was in the 6^th or 7^th  grade. The wooden building where I attended all but the first grade was replaced some years later with a new brick building, the grammar schools in the area were consolidated later to a new school at Olf Fort and the brick building was sold and is now a part of the Baptist Church where Frank attended before he died and where Harry and Kathy are members.  

 At Hall’s Chapel we had a very short school year, I think it was five or 6 months. At Ocoee we had about the same numbers of days in the school year as students have today. At Ocoee school started really early, I don’t remember the dates but it was hot, maybe the first part of August. There was a reason for this, when the cotton was ready for picking, (usually 4 to 6 weeks after school started) we got out of school for 4 or 5 weeks to pick cotton which was done by hand. You attached a strap to a bag, put the strap over one shoulder, pulled the cotton out of each boll and when you got a handful put it in the bag. When the bag was full you took it to the wagon, weighted it on a scale, kept track of how much you picked , dumped it into the wagon and then back to picking again. This was considerably less fun than it sounds. A good picker could pick over 100 pounds a day, some maybe 200. I never was worth a damn picking cotton. Some people would bend over to pick cotton, others crawled on their knees. Another fun part of picking cotton was reaching to get a boll under a leaf and being stung by a packsaddle worm. These were hairy worms about 2 inches long with a design similar to a saddle in the middle, each hair that touched you stung like mad and hurt for several hours. Picking cotton was not one of my favorite memories.

 We had a small outbuilding we called a cotton house where we would store the cotton we had picked until ready to take it to the gin. On Sunday afternoons we were allowed to play in the cotton house. It was real fun, you could dig tunnels and all sort of fun things. When we had enough cotton for a bale we would load it into the wagon and take it to the gin at Ocoee. You drove the wagon under a shed until the middle of the wagon was under a big, about 12 inch,  suction pipe. Moving the pipe over the cotton sucked it up and placing it on a conveyor belt where a part of it was dropped into each gin, steel fingers in the gins separated the seeds from the cotton. The cotton ended up in a large box and packed tightly, when all of the cotton was ginned, steel straps were placed around it, it was taken out  and weighted.  The gin kept the seed as the charge for ginning the cotton. You could sell the cotton at whatever the price was that day  or hold it in hopes the price would increase. A normal bale weighted about 500 pounds. I remember the gin at Ocoee as having 4 gins (cotton gins had a number of machines in a row, each was known as a gin).  Many times you would have to wait for wagons in front of you to unload their cotton and have several wagons behind waiting. The gin workers and the waiting farmers yelled at you if you did not suck up the cotton fast enough to suit them.  

 So far we have not talked about what we ate. An old story is about a city guy on a farm, seeing the big garden full of vegetables asked “what do you do with all that food”. The farmer replied, “we eat what we can and what we can’t we can”.  That about explained it, when the vegetables were ripe we ate them every day and mama and the girls suffered and sweated in the hot kitchen preparing and canning green beans, tomatoes, peaches among others. Farm women talked with pride about this; “I put up 38 jars of peaches this week” or “I did 164 jars of beans over the summer”. When there were lots of us around half gallon jars were used as the older children left home quart jars became common.

 A typical summer breakfast would be tomato’s usually just sliced, hot biscuits and flour gravy. Dinner (lunch) would be, depending on what was ripe, big bowls of green beans, potatoes, corn on the cob, fried okra and cornbread.   Supper (dinner) was usually the leftovers from dinner. Typical winter meals would be something like. Breakfast; hot biscuits and flour gravy or oatmeal with lots of sugar and butter, covered with milk. Dinner, when we were not in school might be pinto beans and cornbread or one of those jars of green beans mama had put up along with cornbread and milk. Supper would probably be a repeat of dinner. Some nights we had only cornbread and milk, the cornbread crumbled into a glass of milk.

 Meat was for special occasions, some Sundays’s we would have a chicken divided up to 8 ways. We usually raised 2 hogs each year for food, when butchered they would weigh up to 400 pounds each. Killing hogs was a big gamble, success depended on cold weather to chill the meat and keep it cool for several days. Early in the morning when we thought the weather was right we would build a fire and start heating water. While the water was heating we would shoot the hog and immediately cut its throat so it would bleed. I still have the knife we used. The hot water would be poured into a 55 gallon drum with the top removed and set at an angle in the ground. The hog would be wrestled into the barrel and moved around and then wrestled out and turned around to do the other end. The hot water, about 140 degrees or more would loosen the hair so it could be easily scraped off. This took 2 or 3 minutes, too long in the hot water would “set” the hair and it would have to be shaved, not scraped. After the hog was scraped it was hung up and the insides removed and saved. They contained fat which was known as “leaf” lard. After removing the leaf lard they were disposed of. The task of cutting up the rest of the hog began, the liver was taken into the house so we would have “fresh meat” for supper. The hams and front legs, after excess fat was removed, were to be covered with salt and packed away in the salt box to cure. Later we used what was known as sugar curing which used a mixture of sugar and salt. In early years we always pulled the back muscles out as tenderloins, later Franks sometimes left them and cut up as pork chops. The head was split open and the brain removed which we ate for breakfast the next morning mixed with scrambled eggs, a very tasty dish and I would still enjoy some. The spare ribs were cut up and used within a few days. And that was day one of killing hogs. 

 On day two the hard work of trimming the fat off the various parts of the hog started, the fat was then cut into small cubes usually smaller than a ice cube. The parts of the hog that were to become sausage were also cut into cubes and then ground by running them through a hand powered grinder. One person putting the meat into the top of the grinder and taking it away as it came out the other end. The second person turning the handle and complaining all the time about how not to feed the meat so fast. After the sausage was ground mama would add seasoning, I remember using sage from a sage bush in the garden and salt and pepper. There may have been other items used to season the sausage. Mama or one of the girls made cloth bags the sausage was stuffed in the bags and hung in the smokehouse.  After the meat had cured for a few weeks it was taken from the salt box and hung in the smokehouse. A small, smokey fire was kept going for several days in the smokehouse and the meat was cured, it would be ok for months or until cooked and eaten.

 We had a big cast iron pot with a rounded bottom, it would probably hold 15 gallons or more. Putting about a pint of water in the bottom and building a fire under it started the lard making. The cubes to make lard were added to the pot and the fire kept going, the pot was stirred frequently using a long stick as a paddle. After several hours the fat would be extracted and the pot would be full of hot oil with what we called “cracklings” floating on top. Many people liked to eat the cracklings and you can buy them today marketed as “Pork Skins”. We had a press the cracklings were put in while still hot and additional oil was pressed out. The hot oil was carefully removed from the pot and poured into a “50 pound lard can”, the next morning the oil had turned to lard. Two large hogs would more than fill up a 50 pound lard can and was enough shortening for the next year.  Fresh cracklings were frequently used to make cornbread, it was a real treat to bite into cornbread and get a crackling.

 Parts of a hog couldn’t be cured and needed to be eaten within a few days, as a result we had meat once or twice a day until it was gone. The parts that could be cured were doled out carefully after being cured to last until the next winter and it was hog killing time again.

 A big source of our food was the garden, the best soil was chosen for the garden and it was fertilized with chicken manure each spring. We grew tomatos, beans, carrots, cabbages, beets and other vegetables. Potatos were grown in a “potato patch” and fresh corn was gathered from the field, it was not the kind of corn sold in the grocery store under names like “silver queen” it was the corn we grew to feed the livestock. However, going to the field about an hour before you were to eat, picking the best ears and cooking them immediately provided flavor you seldom get at the grocery store. The food we didn’t raise ourselves consisted mostly of: Sugar in 100 pound bags, salt, pepper and a few other seasonings, flour in large bags and at times a 100 pound bag of pinto beans. 

 Gardens required a lot of attention, from getting the soil ready to planting the seeds or putting out the plants at the right time to hoeing, plowing, staking and picking the ripe vegetables. The garden needed to be hoed and or plowed about once a week. The plants needed to be sprayed or dusted to keep bugs away. The dust we used on beans and probably some other vegetables was arsenic of lead. Today they would probably put you in jail if you asked for some at a seed and feed store.

 In addition to feeding the corn we grew to livestock, we also used it to make cornbread. Mr Lea had a mill at the corner of Old Federal and Horns Creek road. It was well over a mile around the road, considerably shorter if we cut through the woods to Uncle Bob’s. As I got older, maybe before Frank got married, I would take the corn to the mill. We would shuck the corn, shell it using the Black Hawk hand powered sheller, put the shelled corn in a bag and take it to the mill. We tried to take a bushel, 60 pounds, at a time. I had some options, carry it through the woods and back over my shoulders, carry it around the road or when we had a mule or horse, ride the horse bareback with the corn. I normally picked option 1.  It was a lot of trouble to catch the horse etc.. Mr. Lea only operated the mill on Saturday, it was in a building perhaps 15 by 30 feet and was powered by a 6 horsepower one cylinder engine, a pipe running out the roof for the exhaust. There was no muffler and could be heard popping each time the engine fired for a mile or so. There was a flywheel on either side of the engine about 4 feet in diameter, the entire engine must have weighted over 500 pounds. You turned the flywheel by hand to start the engine. There were 2 mills, one to grind cornmeal which was the one generally used. I think the other was used to crack corn. If I remember correctly Mr. Lea took a toll of one-eight of the corn for grinding it. He put the toll in a big box and sold it somewhere. This was the only mill I was aware of in the area.

 I don’t remember if Sue finished high school in Georgia, I think she did. There was no money for college so what to do. Sue and later Onie went to Aunt George’s house and washed, cooked, cleaned and worked in the house, in return they attended LMU for maybe a year. To hear Onie tell it they were indentured servants. There were 4 boys at least 3 in their teens so there was plenty of cleaning and washing to be done. I am not aware of any of the facts other than as stated above.

 In Polk County Tennessee many, if not most of the elementary school teachers did not have college degrees. I think some college was required. After Sue returned from attending LMU she got a job teaching at Horns Creek school which, like Hall’s Chapel was a one room school held in a church building. If was probably a two mile walk each way over the muddy fields and or muddy roads unless they were frozen or covered with snow. Sue wore galoshes over her shoes and hated the walk every day (almost anyone would). I believe she only taught there one year. There were two families in Old Fort, the Tilleys and the Strattons who were related, they were also related to Herbert Reed who met Sue when he was visiting in Old Fort. Herbert was a math teacher, he and Sue later married. I was about 8 at the time. Herbert was a math teacher who loved math, he had taken every math course offered by The University of Tennessee at Knoxville. He later went summers to Columbia University in New York City and received a masters degree in math.  Herbert was one of the finest persons I have ever known. I don’t remember where he was teaching when they were married but within a year or so he was principal at Niota Tennessee. Their son Jimmy was born while they lived there.

 On the farm we had two mules, later we sold the mules, got a tractor sometime after this got a horse. We normally had two milk cows, they were turned “dry”, meaning no milk, a few weeks before they were due to have a calf. We also had pigs and chickens. All of these must be fed seven days a week, the cows milked twice a day. Until we had the right of way to the creek we also had to draw all the water for them to drink. There were always chores to be done, before and after school, Saturdays and Sundays. Corn had to be shucked and carried to the feeding trough, hay had to be pitched down from the loft and into the managers. The water trough had to be filled, eggs gathered and brought into the house.  Depending on my age I did all of these as some time, but not all at any one time. These were only the everyday chores, they had little to do with farming and the rest of our opportunities for becoming better persons, or even living well.

We cooked and heated with wood, in the summer only the cookstove was used, in the winter both the cookstove and heater required fuel. We burned “slabs” in the cookstove, slabs are the bark edges of logs that are trimmed off to square up a log before the boards are sawn. Most of the lumber at Old Fort was cut using small, portable sawmills and frequently one was in the neighborhood. The slabs had no value as lumber but were available for fuel, all you could get on a wagon for 25 cents, you picked your own out of the pile. Most of them were pine and they burned just fine even if people today do not use them because of the danger of fire. After getting the slabs home they had to be cut the right length to fit the stove. For several years this was done using a two man saw about 5 or 6 feet long. Wood for the heater used trees from the farm, we would select a tree, cut it down, sometimes cut it the right length where it fell, other times dragging it out of the woods with a horse or mule and saw it up back at the house. Most of the wood required splitting before burning. It was always a race to keep the woodpile inventory in decent shape. I was 10 or 12 before I was big enough to do much except carry wood from the woodpile and stack it on the porch to be used the next day.

 Other than the garden we raised cotton, corn and some hay. Cotton was the cash crop, the corn and hay were for our food and to feed the animals. Corn was not ready to gather until after the stalks were killed by frost due to the moisture content. This meant probably mid October or later before it was ready to harvest. After Frank married and left home it meant Bob and I were the persons who gathered the corn on Saturdays. If the field was too wet from rain you had to wait until a Saturday when the ground was frozen. We had gloves but you couldn’t gather corn with them on, gathering corn with bare hands and the ground frozen is not something I remember with  pleasure. When the wagon was loaded it was taken to the corn crib and shoveled inside. Most corn cribs, ours included, were small buildings with the top of the walls somewhat wider than the bottom. The walls were made of narrow, two or three inch, boards nailed vertically with a one and a half or so inch gap between each board to allow the air flow needed to dry the ears of corn. Corn was normally shucked before feeding it to the animals. When things were really bad the animals were fed the shucks separately. Animals would not eat the shucks unless they were very hungry. 

 Cows were put into the stalls to be milked, food was placed in the food trough, the cow would put their head in to get a bite and you pulled and fastened a stick so it did not allow the cow to get their head out while she was milked. Mama usually milked the cows. In the winter, I don’t remember the summer, the cows were kept in the stalls overnight. Needles to say the cows used the stall as a bathroom, fresh straw was spread in the stalls to cover and absorb the mess, over winter it grew to be about a foot thick. In spring it was time to “clean out the stalls”, this required several operations. First was digging up the compacted manure with a mattock. Then using a hay fork loading it through the narrow door into the wagon, taking the loaded wagon to the field where the hay fork was used to spread it around for fertilizer. This process was repeated until the stables were cleaned out. One year, I must have been about twelve or thirteen, I had a blister in the palm of my hand from doing something and it was time to clean out the stables. The blister broke and became infected, I walked to Ocoee and caught the bus to Copperhill where Aunt Mattie’s husband Uncle Albert was company doctor at the Copper Company. Uncle Albert took one look at my hand, pulled out a small scalpel placed it at one side of the infection and pushed it in, I thought I was going to die, then he twisted it to cut the whole thing out. I knew then I was going to die but the infection came out about the size of a pea and I had no other problems with it.

 A little word about medicine in my younger days. If you had stomach problems, which was not unusual in the summer due to bad water and lack of refrigeration, you took a dose of Epson Salts or Castor Oil to “clean you out”. If you cut or hurt yourself there was mecurcone (sp) and iodine, take your pick. We also had alcohol to help clean the wound out.

 There was a cycle to raising crops, after the crops were gathered if it was dry enough many farmers “turned” the ground for the next year. Turning plows plowed the ground deeply, four to six inches, turning the weeds, corn or cotton stalks on the bottom side and fresh dirt on the top. A man and good pair of mules working hard for about ten hours could turn an acre of ground. What did not get turned in the fall was done in the spring. The next task was to use a disc harrow to break up the ground into smaller clumps and smooth out the rough turned ground. The third task was to break up the soil and smooth it out so it was soft by using a spring toothed harrow. Now the field was ready for planting. Planting required using a plow to make a furrow to plant the seed in, farmers were proud of being able to make furrows parallel and straight, which is not easy driving a mule and holding a plow steady at the same time. This was followed by planting the seed and covering them up. We used a planter pulled by a mule. Our planter had two cylinders mounted one behind the other and holding about 3 gallons each. One held seed and the other fertilizer. Plates in the bottom of the cylinders were replaceable, the plates controlled the amount of seed and fertilizer used. There was a large front wheel attached to a shaft, when the planter moved the shaft turned the seed and fertilizer plates distributing the seed and fertilizer. Two back wheels were made so they covered the seed and fertilizer as the planter moved down the furrow. We used 2-10-2 fertilizer which came in 200 pound bags, think we used 200 pounds to the acre. Two hundred pounds bags of fertilizer are not easy to move when you are a kid.

 After the seed came up we did what was called “chopping”, this was going down each row with a hoe and chopping out the plants when they were too close together. Cotton was chopped to about six or eight inches between plants and corn somewhat more. Today corn is planted many times closer, fertilized heavily and produces ten times as much corn per acre as we did.  Crops needed to be plowed three or more times and hoed at least twice to keep the weeds down.  After corn was over three feet high the leaves, which have little saw like edges, would rub against your sweaty skin and was very uncomfortable.    

 Probably 1936 or maybe 1937 Frank got a job working at Dixie Foundry, making the grand sum of 13 cents per hour. I was not old enough to do a lot of work on the farm, the girls who were still home hoed the cotton and corn but they did not plow or do other heavy work. When we needed help we would get Gib Davis to plow or whatever was needed, working a 10 hour day for a dollar. During this period there was a lot of labor trouble, workers complaining about working conditions and pay. Few companies in the South had unions and there was a lot of labor unrest. The workers at Dixie Foundry, Frank and the majority of them at least, decided to go on strike. Frank worked the picket line at night carrying a hickory stick about eighteen inches long as a persuader to not cross the picket line. About the same time Herbert, Sue’s husband had a brother who was killed over a labor dispute. If memory is correct he was one of those who were not striking and was inside working when a gun was fired outside the plant, the bullet killing him.

I do not remember Frank working at Dixie Foundry after the strike. They were paving US 64 and Frank got a job as concrete inspector, his job was to takes several samples of concrete each day placing it in a form that made a block about 6 by 6 by 16 inches. These samples would cure for a number of days then be broken in half with a machine, Frank recording the strength of the sample and other information.  Times were getting better, on paydays Frank would stop by the store on his way home and buy a big Hershey bar. We would all gather round and get two or three squares, it was like heaven.

 Another job I remember Frank having was working on was building an electrical transmission from the new power plant above Reliance. The steel for those steel towers you see on the tops of mountains was hand carried by people like Frank up the mountain one load at a time. He said some of them were over twenty feet long and took two men, the pieces bounced with every step and his back really hurt.

 Times were getting better, we sold the mules and bought a new John Deere, Model “H” tractor and a Athens Plow Company 20 inch disc turning plow with a rubber tire. Model “H” tractors were two cylinder, tricycle front wheels and  rated at 6 horsepower at the drawbar. To save money it used two kinds of fuel, you started it using gasoline - when it got hot you turned a knob and started burning a cheaper fuel about like kerosene. When stopping it, you turned the knob again shutting all fuel off and let it run until the fuel in the pipe was used up. To start it you turned the knob to gasoline, set the choke on and cranked it by turning a flywheel about twelve inches in diameter. The spark plugs were fired by a magneto which was dependent on the speed you were turning the flywheel for making a good spark. If lucky, a few turns of the flywheel and it started. Frequently your luck was not so good. It was very hard for me to crank it the first couple of years.

 John Deere tractors, regardless of size, shared some common traits. They had tricycle front wheels, were hand cranked using a flywheel, had two cylinders, a hand operated clutch, a brake pedal for each rear wheel and long axles for the back wheels allowing the width of the back wheels to be adjusted based on the job to be done. You could also turn the back wheels around to increase the total amount of adjustment. Each back wheel had a 150 pound weight attached with two bolts. When turning the wheels around you had to take the weights off. Not when we first got it, but later, I can remember after getting the wheel turned around picking up the 150 pound weight with one hand and getting the bolt to hold it started with the other. With the tricycle front wheels and the individual rear wheel brakes you could spin the front wheels while stepping hard on the brake and turn the tractor around in its own length. Tricycle front wheel vehicles are inherently unsafe and later I believe a law was passed prohibiting producing them.

 With the new John Deere and Athens plow a man could plow five acres a day and not be as tired as he would plowing one with mules. In addition, with lights a second person could plow on into the night or a person working in a plant or office could do as much after they got home as a person with mules could do full time. We did some custom plowing, I remember Frank and Fletcher Lea lining up some work in Georgia and were gone two or three weeks working 24/7 between them.      

 When I was about eleven Frank began to date a teacher, Willie May “Bill” Higdon, about 1940  they were married. After he married Frank no longer lived us with but came by frequently to help out, I was the man of the house, twelve years old and in the eighth grade.

 Bill had been raised in Reliance Tennessee where her father had a country store, owned most of the land along the river and was a big duck in a small pond. There were several older Higdon children who had moved to places like Knoxville and Louisville. Bill had not wanted to be a farmers wife but Frank wanted to be a farmer. This was resolved by Frank working and farming as a sideline. Much later he became a rural postman which generally took five hours or so a day and had the afternoons to farm.

 I remember 1938 as being the year of the big snow, I believe the next snow that came close was in 1993. We had about a foot of snow and it did not melt, school was out for two or three weeks. When I was young I thought of myself as being the last of the great white hunters. The snow and no school was an ideal time to hunt rabbits, we could see their tracks and they could not run fast. I don’t know how many I killed and we ate. In the winter I also set out rabbit “gums” to catch rabbits. Some were made of hollow logs, ours were made of four boards about 18 inches long nailed together to form a rectangle with the top being an inch or so shorter than the other three sides. The back end was closed by nailing a board across it. Two holes were drilled in the top, one about six and the other about twelve inches from the front. A forked stick was placed in the first hole and a stick the length between the front and last hole had a door attached with a string and a stick with a notch cut in it attached to the other end. When the notched stick, the trigger,  was placed in the second hole the door would be raised. Taking the gum to a place where there might be rabbits some corn or maybe a piece of cabbage would be placed in the back the gum would be set by putting the trigger in the hole. When a rabbit came in to get the food they would hit the trigger and the door would slide down trapping the rabbit. Gums were checked daily to see if we had caught anything. If a rabbit was in the gum I would stand the gum on end, reach down inside and catch the rabbit with bare hands and pull it out grabbing it by its hind legs with one hand. With the other hand I would give it a sharp blow on the neck breaking it.  Sometimes we ate the rabbit, other times I would gut it, take it on the school bus to Ocoee, get off the bus at the store and sell it. Walking up the hill to school with a dime or whatever rabbits were worth that week. A man would come around to the store once or twice a week, pick up the rabbits and sell them to people in town.

 In Georgia we had attended Summerhour Methodist Church. When we moved to Old Fort there were no Methodist churches in the area but there was the Shed Presbyterian Church, at one time it had been a member of the Cumberland Presbyterian branch. I think it may have been a Cumberland church when we moved there, later it became a member of what was called the “Northern” church. The Shed was a “yoked” church meaning the pastor served as pastor at 3 or 4 churches and came by every third or fourth Sunday to preach, we met for Sunday School the other Sundays. Otherwise he was not available except in emergencies. The Shed was an old established church, tombstones indicted it was started in the early 1800's. By the time we were there it had seen better days, at one time it had a full time pastor and a manse that was not very old.  It was a relatively large rural church building and had several sides with wings out. Sometime later the building was torn down and the lumber used to build a new, smaller building in the traditional rectangular shape of country churches. Better roads, better times and better transportation spelled its demise, the buildings and grounds were sold to Dewy Mercer and he used the building to store hay. The building in bad shape is still there, the cemetery is maintained and looks better than it ever did when I was a kid.

 One of the pastors we had was Rev. John Wooten, (sp) he took an interest in me and tried to motivate me by giving me books on people he admired, sadly he failed miserably. Some years I don’t think we had a minster. We had a person named Billy Ventable (sp) for a while, he had been raised in Korea of missionary parents and ran a mission of some sort in Chattanooga, it might have been a soup kitchen but I think they also had housing for homeless persons. I think Mr. Coolidge, a relative of the past president brought him over for services. Later we had a pastor who lived in Dalton, Georgia and had several kids about my age, I must have been in high school at the time. It was a matter of pride to the women of the neighborhood to invite the preacher home for Sunday dinner after they preached.  It was always a big meal, frequently having fried chicken or maybe ham, potatos, green beans, tomatoes in season and biscuits or rolls. I think the women decided ahead of time who’s turn it was to have the preacher for dinner. A few weeks ago we were in the St Johns Island Presbyterian Church where they had a guest minister on the day we were there, before he began his sermon he said, “my wife told me before I left home if anyone invited me for lunch to go”, so the practice has not died out completely.

 When we moved to Old Fort the Shed graveyard had a number of small sheds built of wood over graves, most, if not all of them were about eight or nine feet long, maybe 7 feet tall and five feet wide with the gravestones inside. They had a peaked roof and a little railing, similar to what one might see on a deck. Only a small percentage of the graves where sheltered from the elements this way.

 No story about the Shed would be complete without talking about Bob Jones College in Cleveland, now University, located in South Carolina and one of the religious right’s fundamentalists republican party strongholds. Bob Jones College was founded and located in Cleveland, Tennessee by Bob Jones Sr. to provide a college education with a Christian background. Many of the male students were preparing for the ministry and practice preaching was needed. In order to get in the practice teaching students would go throughout the area, three or four to a car looking for places to preach. One would preach and the others would listen. They were welcomed at the Shed as we did not hear the Word of God as often as we wished, (at least the adults didn’t), so we had a number of them come out for Sunday services and sometimes special services. Some were in our lives for several months, others only once or twice. One poor student, probably his first sermon and scared to death, was giving the sermon and he urinated on himself, he was there talking and you could see it running down his leg into his shoe and onto the floor. He finished the sermon, I don’t think he came back to the Shed. 

 Mary went to Bob Jones College for one or two years after getting out of high school. I have no idea what she studied or learned but the college had some interesting rules. To protect the young ladies from harm the boys were required to walk down one side of the street and the girls the other, when between classes or even when they were on a date. When Bob Jones moved to South Carolina I heard they built stone or concrete walls around the women’s dorms topped with broken glass embedded in concrete.

 Henrietta Ayre, a relative of Frank Ayre had established the”Ayre School of Business” in Cleveland. Henrietta was a large woman, well educated and successful. She was in Georgia visiting, (I think Aunt Mae), and met Hershel Green a local farmer with a limited education, they “hit it off” and married. Neither of them had been married before and were considered by many a little old for first marriages.

 After graduating from high school Elizabeth attended and graduated from the Ayre School of Business providing her with the education needed to get a decent job. During World War II Elizabeth was working in Cleveland and met Dick Blair who was working for the Corp of Engineers as an inspector while they were building a tunnel on the Ocoee river to provide more power by tunneling the water down to what is known today as Ocoee #3 powerhouse. Dick was from Alabama where his father had been sheriff for many years. He was an avid fisherman and could throw a small double loop with a fly rod. Later Dick was an inspector for dredging of the Tennessee river and had a lot of time to fish off the back of the dredge.   

 After Onie finished high school she went to stay with Aunt George and attend LMU paying for room and board by helping Aunt George with the housework. She didn’t stay long and hated the work she was asked to do. She got a job in Cleveland working behind the soda fountain at Central Drug store, she also worked at Kay’s Ice Cream shop. I don’t remember which was first. She met W. J. “Buddy” Miller who worked in the office at Dixie Foundry they were later married on a very rainy day. We rode to the wedding in a “A” model ford, I think it must have been Virgil Miles. Onie had a habit of being late but she was on time that day.

 While I was in high school, all of the family gone except Mary, Bob and me, mama got a job teaching at Old Fort school, where she taught until she retired. Changes were made, the school bus came down the road in front of the house which meant we were in the Old Fort school district, mama and Bob rode the bus and Bob finished grammar school at Old Fort not Ocoee.

 One indication of how we progressed over the years was the washing of clothes. When we first moved to Tennessee clothes were washed in a washpot in the yard with a fire under the pot to heat the water and stirring the clothes with a wooden paddle. (This was the same pot used to make lard, discussed previously) During lean times mama made the soap to wash with. Later we bought a steel cone about 8 inches in diameter with a stick coming out of the top, pushing the cone up and down in a tub of clothes provided an action much like a washing machine. A few years later we purchased a manual wringer which was fastened on the side of a tub with a handle which you turned to wring out the clothes. About the time I finished high school mama bought a washing machine powered with a gas engine. You poured water into the top, put in soap and clothes and started the engine with a foot pedal. After the clothes were washed you squeezed  the water out of them by using the powered wringer. I think there was a powered pump to empty the water, after the water was emptied, clean water was poured in, the clothes were rinsed, run through the wringer and hung out to dry.

 I always loved to fish, when we first moved to Tennessee I tried fishing in the creek with a pin on a hook like in some of the poems and stories of little boys catching fish. The creek on Uncle Bob’s property started about a mile back and was fed by springs along the bank, it was very small and had nothing more than minnows in it. For several years the only place I was allowed to fish was between Uncle Bob’s house and the hwy. Punk Oneal who lived by the L&N railroad was a little older than me was sort of a nature boy in that he was always out fishing or hunting, his parents weren’t as strict as mama and he wasn’t closely supervised. He would fish further down the creek where a couple more small creeks joined and made it several times larger and had fish up to ten or twelve inches long. He had the skill to slip a hook under a fish and catch it by jerking up the line. He was my fishing hero. Punk joined the service when he was 15 or 16, his mother signed for him, married a girl in New Jersey while in the service and lived in New Jersey after that.

 About the time I entered high school I became interested in radios probably because we did not have one and my friend, Junior Lea was interested in them. The first one I made was a crystal set which required no power, it used a piece of iron pyrite touched in sensitive place, (which kept moving) with a cat’s whisker, a long antenna and headphones. Later I got into making one tube radios, powered by six flashlight batteries. These used an “A” battery made by soldering two flashlight batteries together in parallel and a “B” battery made by soldering four batteries together in series. These radios used a coil to determine the radio bands available and were made by winding fine wire around a cylinder, there were two sets of windings on a cylinder, the number of turns in each set determined the range of stations you could pull in. For example, you might pull in regular AM stations by having one set with 40 turns and the other with 75. These plugged into the chassis, by changing the coils to different bands almost every station in the world could be heard.  The individual stations within a band were accessed by the means of a variable condenser, consisting of two parallel sets of half moon shaped aluminum blades, one set was fixed and the other was attached to a movable shaft. Those on the movable shaft were inserted between between  the fixed blades. Turning the shaft changed the relation of the blades which changed the frequency and station. Again with a long antenna and headphones I could pick up BBC in London and shortwave stations all over the world. One night I counted over 400 stations coming in loud and clear using three or four different coils. 

 Bridges across the Ocoee and Hiwassee rivers were box girder type construction, there was a bridge between Ocoee and Parksville, between Benton Station and Benton and one between the two. While I was in high school the box girder bridge over the Hiwassee on the hwy north of Benton collapsed when a truck following a school bus drove over it, the bus was OK but the truck driver was killed. An army type pontoon bridge was used for several months until a new bridge was built.

 When I started high school I walked to the hwy to catch the bus, which picked up kids from the Tennessee - Georgia state line to Ocoee, we then proceeded up the hwy through Benton Station and on to Polk County High School at Benton. Benton Grammar School was on the same site as the high school. Mr. Blair was the principal of both schools, a very good physics teacher and basketball coach when I was there. The first year I was in high school we had a football coach named Mr. Burris, it may have been his first year of coaching. Due to the war effort he did not return and we did not have football the rest of my time at Polk County High School.

 I have always enjoyed reading, I am not a scholar and have never enjoyed learning for the sake of learning. I enjoy learning when it is something I want to know, not when it something I should know. As a result I was a poor student with less than zero interest in English, much history and several of the other required subjects. The summer before I was a Junior I bumped my leg against something one day and it was sore, pulling up my pants leg I could see there were two long scratches across my shinbone, much like an aggressive briar might do. The middle of the scratches were red and inflamed. There is almost no blood supply where the leg was inflamed and it is very hard to get wounds to heal. Between having no real desire to go to school and trying to get my leg healed I quit high school sometime before Christmas. Now I know this was a stupid thing to do. The next year I returned and finished High School.

  High school was not much fun, having no transportation other than the school bus after school activities were generally not available to us. I did have some buddies within walking distance in the neighborhood; Junior and Edward Lea, Clarence and Terry Mercer and T. D. Hooker.

 I think it was Edward who had the idea that we could borrow Arthur Frazier’s buggy and our horse and go for a buggy ride on a fine Sunday afternoon. I took our horse to the Lea’s, got Edward then over to the Frazier’s, hooked the horse to the buggy and drove over to the Bakers and picked up Mary Etta and someone else, maybe her sister, both big girls to go for a ride. We had not gone far when there was a strange scraping noise, looking around we saw the buggy was so overloaded with the four of us the axles had bent and the wheels were scraping the sides of the buggy. What to do???? First we all walked to a nearby house, borrowed a wrench and a piece of pipe, took off each wheel and using the pipe as a lever straightened the axles and put the wheels back on. At least we boys walked back to the Bakers and by time we got the buggy home we forgot to tell Arthur Frazier about it.

 During my growing up years there was little, if anything, I enjoyed more than hunting. We always had a dog or two but none that were very good for hunting. Clarence Mercer also enjoyed hunting, my brother Bob and his younger brother Terry looked at hunting as something to do.  After I was old enough, maybe fourteen, Clarence and I would get together at school to plan on going Possum hunting that night. After supper, when we could talk mama into it, we would walk over to the Mercer’s, (Dewey’s Brother) pick up Clarence and Terry to go hunting. The Mercer’s had a hound or two but their neighbor had a good Black and Tan hound named “Buck” that we usually “borrowed” for the evening. Buck had fallen off a railroad bridge and walked sort of funny but he was far and away the best hunting dog. On a good night we would catch two or three Possums. Generally we killed and skinned them - there was a market for Possum hides, we could mail them off to Sears and get a check a few days later. Sometimes we would take them home alive, feed them for a few days and then eat them. Once in a while we would catch a skunk or civet cat which looks like a skunk except it has two white stripes down its back instead of one. Smells just as bad when they release their perfume. We would get home at midnight or later having walked up to ten miles total, tired and cold having had a wonderful time.

 Americans today have a hard time thinking about lights without electricity whether from a battery or a lamp plugged into the wall. We did not have that option, for night hunting we used carbide lamps. Miners used them in the mines, they were made to attach to the miners cap leaving both hands free. Carbide lights consisted of three main parts: the top part was a container that held three or four oz of water with a little valve to let the water slowly drip out the bottom. The bottom was about the same size and it screwed onto the top. The third major part was a reflector with a small hole in the center and a flint/wheel similar to a cigarette lighter flint/wheel. To use you filled the top with water and the bottom with carbide. I do not know the chemical makeup of carbide but it looked like small grey stones about the size of a pea. Turning the water valve on allowed water to drip into the bottom which caused a chemical reaction producing a flammable gas which was forced out the hole in the middle of the reflector. Holding you hand over the reflector allowed the gas to build up then drawing your hand quickly across the flint/wheel produced a spark which set the gas on fire. The amount of gas produced and the size of the flame dependent on the amount of water dropping on the carbide. When everything was working well they put out an amazing amount of focused light. The small hole in the reflector where the gas was ejected would get clogged and need cleaning, we normally carried a strand of screen wire to unclog the hole. You would sometimes run out of water and/or carbide while up on the side of a mountain. Hopefully someone in the hunting party would still have a light until you could refill the water or carbide. I don’t know the chemical reaction but as carbide produced the gas it changed from looking like gray pebbles to a wet messy gray powder like wet ashes and you would need to empty the bottom and put new carbide in (hopefully you had some with you) then get it started, if you did not have a friend with a light you had to do this in the dark..   

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