AT ROYSTON UNTIL WORLD WAR II
During the 17 years we lived on the farm at Royston there were a
number of other stories, some good, and some not so good.
Wes Kennedy and his family lived about a mile northeast of
Royston and they had three big dogs that had the bad habit of
chasing automobiles and barking and snapping at the front wheels.
The dogs chased the family car the same as they did strange cars
which passed by along the road. Wes tried every way he knew to
break the dogs from the bad habit, but every effort had failed.
Now the story goes that one member of the Royston Spit-and-
Whittle Club suggested that he tie a burlap bag to the spokes of
his front wheels. As the dogs snapped at the wheels, they were
supposed to get their teeth caught in the burlap, this would hurt
their teeth and break them from chasing cars.
They say Wes was anxious to try it, so he tied a potato sack to
one front wheel and drove right on home. As usual the three dogs
came out to meet him, growling and snapping at the turning
wheels, and the scheme really worked. The dog that snapped the
spinning sack never chased another car as long as he lived--which
was about five seconds. You see, dogs with broken necks seldom
chase cars. Oh well, they still had two big dogs and that was
enough for the whole family.
Wes and his wife also had quite a few boys and girls, a lot of
little ones and at least one big one--a girl. I was told that
there was a difference of opinion as to just how big the girl
really was. Wes thought of her as just a little girl, but she
thought she was big enough to go with the boys. And her mother,
having been a girl once herself, sort of agreed with the girl.
Since her dad objected so vigorously, the girl, with the aid of
her mother, devised a little scheme which was designed to satisfy
the girl and yet not be too painful to her father, especially
since he was not to know what was taking place. Anyway, the way
I heard it, the kids were hoeing cotton one particular
afternoon--who knows how many kids, maybe eight, maybe ten,
anyway enough that one girl more or less would hardly be noticed
by a father who was often busy at some other job which in most
cases was easier than hoeing cotton.
The cotton rows butted up against a county road about a half-mile
from the house. And in the weeds along the road ditch was a
perfect place for the girl to hide a paper bag full of her clean
clothes. And after sundown was a perfect time for her to
exchange her hoe for that bag of clothes. So, when the other
kids put down their hoes for the night, Wes didn't count kids and
didn't notice that the big girl was missing. She had hoed to the
far end of the rows and had not returned with the others on that
last round after sundown.
Meanwhile, the girl's prince charming didn't carry her away on
his white steed, but rather in his black Model A Ford. She kept
her date with her boy and then spent the night with her girl
friend. Next morning the girl, dressed again in her work
clothes, picked up her hoe at the far end of the cotton rows and
joined her brothers and sisters in the field on their first round
of hoeing. No one ever told her dad about the incident, so he
lived happily ever after.
In those days, when I wasn't too busy farming, I earned a little
money at other things. I did road work for Fisher County quite a
few months one year. One day I was hauling caliche in the county
truck to fill in holes in the road by a bridge. When I was
hauling my last load for the day, I was not in any particular
hurry, so I stopped by my home to let Dennis and Anita go with
me. I wanted them to get a lot of experience at a lot of
different things, as I had done when I was a boy. I didn't want
them to grow up in ignorance. There were times, I'm sure, Ima
wondered whether I wanted them to grow up at all. Well this was
one of those occasions. I was glad Ima wasn't along.
The kids played around while I unloaded the truck. And after I
had finished my work, I took one of the sideboards from the
truck, which was a two-by-eight twelve feet long, and I placed it
across the buttment of the bridge. With me on one end and the
kids on the other, I could see-saw them up and down and they
could splash their feet in the water. What could be more fun to
a three-year-old and a five-year-old? We had fun and all went
well until time to load up and go home.
Dennis was out on the end of the board and I told him to sit
still and let Anita get up first and come to me out on the road,
then it would be his turn. Well, Anita got up and was walking
toward me when Dennis decided he wanted to be first. Nothing I
could do or say would make him change his mind. I just couldn't
get him to sit that extra few seconds. He got to his feet and
tried to pass Anita on the eight-inch board. And of course,
since Dennis was biggest, Anita went off into the water--head
first. I couldn't turn loose of the board quickly and jump in
after her; I had to hold on while Dennis came on out and got off
the board. By this time Anita had come up again and I lowered
the board to her. She crawled upon it and came out with mud in
both hands and was laughing. Excitedly she said, "Daddy, me pick
up mud mit me hands."
It was not the time of year to go swimming because the weather
and water were both too cold. But inside the truck cab, with the
glasses up, it was hot. So I put Anita up in the seat with all
her clothes off and she was comfortable right away. Her clothes
dried out before we got home and we put them back on her. I sort
of hoped that Ima wouldn't have to know about the accident, but
do you think Anita could keep it secret? Goodness no! She had
to go and tell Ima the whole story, in her own small way.
I worked off-and-on for Calvin Carriker all the years we lived at
Royston. Along with his farming he also operated a grocery
store, a filling station, and the post office. Ed Lewis worked
full time for Calvin for years, and at one time was driving a
stripped down Model T Ford, and there was something wrong with
the T which Ed had not been able to remedy. At slow speed it
skipped on one cylinder; at high speed it ran okay. When I speak
of high and low speeds, I'm speaking in the neighborhood of,
"Under ten miles an hour it skipped and over fifteen it didn't."
One day after a rain, Calvin asked me why didn't I help Ed, and
the two of us get the old car to running better, since it was too
wet to work in the field. I asked Ed what all he had done to the
motor, and after he told me, I told him it had a broken piston.
But Ed said he had looked at the pistons when he had the head off
grinding the valves, and the pistons were okay.
I told him, "Okay, let's run through it once more. You have put
in new plugs, timer, manifold, gaskets, and ground the valves.
You have replaced everything that could cause it to skip on one
cylinder except a bad piston."
Then Calvin said to me, "Why don't you take the piston out while
Ed gets a piston from somewhere?"
Looking at the pistons from the top, Ed couldn't see the broken
piston, but when we took it out, we found it broken on one side
all the way from the bottom up to the top ring groove. We
replaced that one bad piston and the old car ran okay.
There were other troubles with automobiles in those days. Today
some of us older people are inclined to talk about the good old
days and tell of how we were born during the horse-and-buggy days
and how we lived through the Model T era, the Great Depression of
the 1930s and into the Jet Age. However, most of us have failed
to inform the younger generations about the "broken-fender" age
and the "drain-your-car-every-night" era. These two periods
overlapped to a considerable degree and ran concurrently much of
the time.
That was when car fenders were bolted to the running board at one
end and the other end of the fender was allowed to vibrate and
flop up and down--especially on rough roads, and there were no
smooth ones. The constant flopping caused the fenders to begin
to break directly above each wheel. This called for a welding
job to repair the break. Then a few weeks later the fender was
beginning to break again in the same place. And this called for
yet another repair job, and this went on and on throughout the
entire life of the car. It happened to all cars alike--the
Essex, the Nash, the Whippet, and even the Hupmobile.
This broken-fender age lasted from about 1928 until the late
1950s, and for me it extended into the 1960s because the only
cars I could afford were old and well used and the fenders had
been repaired by any number of other previous owners.
Why didn't fenders break before 1928? A number of reasons. They
were much smaller and lighter, and therefore they didn't flop and
bend and break. Furthermore, cars were slower, and many of them
didn't last long enough to run far enough to break their fenders.
The fenders outlasted many of the motors
Now, concerning the drain-your-car-every-cold-night age. Wood
alcohol was about the only antifreeze we had, and it would boil
away easily. Also it would evaporate and it was expensive,
Furthermore, after making a long drive or pulling a heavy load,
you never knew whether you still had enough alcohol to protect
your motor from a freeze-up. Nor did we have efficient weather
forecasts telling us just how cold it was going to get before
morning. Therefore, most of us didn't use alcohol. We just used
water and drained it out in cold weather.
So, all cars had a handy little faucet under the radiator. And
most cars had another faucet on one side of the motor. Together
they made it real easy to drain the water out. By raising one
side of the engine hood, I could lean across the fender and reach
both faucets easily, even in the dark, as I often did.
On one particular winter night, it was about midnight when a
norther hit and woke me up. I knew I should have drained the car
before I went to bed But being a gambler at heart, as well as
being lazy all over, I took a chance--and lost. And with a fresh
norther roaring outside, there was just one thing to do, go drain
the car. So, clothed in my shorts and my house shoes, and hidden
behind a cloak of darkness, I hurried out to drain the car. I
quickly raised one side of the hood, leaned across the cold
fender, and in a jiffy I had both faucets open.
Then as I raised my weight off the fender, a sharp pain in the
skin of my stomach reminded me that I was living in the age of
broken fenders. When I leaned across the fender, my weight had
caused the crack in the fender to open, and as I lifted my weight
the fender bit me right in the stomach. I had to push my weight
back down on the fender and hold its mouth open with my hands
while I carefully removed my stomach.
Despite the mechanical problems we had suffered during the 1920s,
by the early 1930s the automobile was a proven necessity and the
farm tractor was beginning to crowd in and push the horse off the
farm. So I decided to cash in on my horses before the price
fell.
In the spring of 1934, when a lot of farmers were buying horses
for the coming farming season, I sold all my work horses. Now, I
didn't have a tractor and I couldn't afford to buy one, but I
figured I could build one. I had never seen a home-made
tractor--never even heard of one. But now that I had sold all my
horses, I was left with no choice except to build one.
Again it was a matter of trusting my own judgment and going out
on my own. Again there was no turning back; I had to go forward.
I used a truck differential and a car motor. And by the time I
got it all together and put plows on it, my cost was $250. I
have seen tractors that others have built since then, and I
helped neighbors build a few, but that first one I built beat
them all. I farmed with it two years, then sold it for as much
as it had cost me, and then I bought a used Farmall.
While I was dealing with horses and tractors, our kids were
making history on their own. They had this little white mama dog
that had never had pups and they had an old mama cat that had
come from no-telling-where, and she had stopped over at our place
long enough to give birth to three kittens. But while her
kittens were still suckling, the old cat up and died. And the
next thing we knew that little dog had adopted those three
kittens and was letting them nurse. We never did know whether
they got any milk for their effort, but they really put forth the
effort. I had never heard of a dog being that friendly with any
member of the cat family.
During the lean years, when I had time to work for the other
fellow a little, I wasn't content to hoe or drive his tractor for
a dollar a day. Instead, I was always looking for a way to make
money easier and faster. Now, running a row binder didn't
necessarily make money easier, but it made it quite a bit faster.
One fall I took my row binder and car and tractor and Ima, and we
all went out and made $300 in a single month, cutting feed for
neighbors. That was clear money above all operating expenses,
car expenses, binder repairs, and a babysitter at home for Dennis
and Anita.
Now you may think I'm a male chauvinist, listing Ima along with
my other property that I took. But I didn't mean it that way. I
simply meant to list her with the items I took. You see, I had
to take her, she wouldn't go voluntarily.
During that month, we slept in a bed on top of our car. We had
all the tools we needed for repairing the binder right in the
middle of any field. And we always had plenty of hot bath water
right from the tractor radiator. It was clean water--we put in
fresh clear water daily.
We also found other ways to pick up a few extra dollars. When
World War II was in full swing and scrap metal was bringing a
good price, we took a few loads of scrap to Sweetwater and sold
it. While unloading there one day, I noticed an old Buick car in
the scrap pile. I looked it over, and the more I looked at it
the better it looked to me. Finally I paid the man $30 for it,
pumped up the tires, put in a one-dollar battery and drove it
home. It proved to be one of the best running cars I had ever
owned. We drove it two years and then swapped it off for a $45
milk cow.
It seems that about half the years we lived at Royston were dry
years and that about half of every wet year was dry. So there
were a lot of dry times when I was not farming because there was
no farming to be done. On one of those occasions I rented an old
blacksmith shop at Royston--nothing in it, just four walls and a
roof. I think I paid two dollars a month for the use of it,
which was all it was worth, considering the sandy dirt floor that
came with it, and with no windows for light. It had big doors at
one end for cars to come through, some of which I repaired and
some I wrecked out and sold for parts. In addition, I stocked
and sold a few new parts too.
Wes Kennedy came into my shop one day and showed me some auto
light bulbs he had bought at Sweetwater at 20 cents each. And he
added, "Some places get 35 cents for them."
I showed him the same kind of bulbs in my shelves which I was
selling at 15 cents. He looked at them and said, "I didn't know
you sold light bulbs. You mean you sell them for 15 cents?"
I told him, "Yes, they cost me 8 cents, and I've got to make a
little profit on them to stay in business."
Of course, we laughed at Wes, and he laughed with us, for
thinking he had found such a big bargain at Sweetwater, and had
overlooked a bigger bargain right at home.
This shop work went on for about three months. Then one day it
rained and I closed up shop and went back to farming. Instead of
working at a dollar a day, I cleared about $3 a day in the shop.