Chapter 1 - Continued Part II

LIFE AFTER DAD MARRIED MOM (PAT)

Litchfield

o  When Pop remarried, we made a pack to call “Pat” mom because dad told us she was our mom now.  We didn’t have one so that sounded good to me and Lisa.  We did pretty well calling her mom but it was difficult because it was sudden and unnatural at first.  Phillip really struggled with that.  He’d say, “Pat, I mean mom.”  She was pretty nice to us and frankly, it was wonderful having a mom; that part felt natural and made me feel secure and stable.  Uncle Bob and Aunt Lora Thomas kept Phillip much of the time between my dad’s divorce and remarriage to Pat.  Bob and Lora had the adoption papers ready for Pop to sign so they could adopt Phillip but Pop ultimately stopped it; he couldn’t go through with it.

o   When Pat and my dad married, boy was I happy to have a mom. For sure, we did fight and we disagreed on most everything, and I was not an easy child to raise but she stuck with me, believed in me, and was a good mom to me.

o   When mom and dad first married, they moved to Litchfield which was about 60 miles away from Meade County where dad worked and where mom was from but I imagine it had to do with her being pregnant with Lou-Ann and then not wanting to hear all the noise they would hear in Meade County.  It was scandalous!  We were poor as church mice but we had a TV because I remember Uncle Bob Thomas helping dad put up a TV antenna at the house.  Back then, there was no cable so you had to have an antenna and we only got three channels:  ABC, NBC, and CBS out of Louisville.

o   When I started first grade at Litchfield, mom made me a chocolate treat and put it in aluminum foil on the first day of school, but I forgot about it and it melted in my pocket.  After school she walked up to get me and asked me how I liked my treat.  I told her I forgot about it and pulled it out but, of course, it was all melted after being in my pocket all day!  

o   When I was little, I was trying to “kill flies” by peeing on them in the bathroom and mom asked what it the world I was doing and I said, “killing flies.”  Not sure that worked but mom told that story over and over so it must have been a sight to see.  When I was killing flies, I was in the bathroom with Lisa and I peed standing up while she sat down and I thought I was doing all the work killing flies.  I asked her why she did that and she said she could not go standing up. I told her she was not trying hard enough so she tried and peed all over herself and her drawers.  She said, “told you.”  I was bewildered that we were different and I was too young to understand the difference.  I think I still believed she was not trying hard enough.

o   During this time, people went to the closest church to where they lived so we went to a nearby Church of Christ.  I was too young to listen to the sermon and I was bored so decided it would be fun to spit on the church floor.  And I did.  Pop was totally embarrassed and he took me outside the church and gave me a good paddling which I earned and needed.  He said he took me back to church and I had big tears in my eyes and was a perfect angel. He said when he took me back in that every eye was on him and me.  I remember doing this although I don’t remember the consequences and going back in.  Afterward, the church people must have felt sorry for us and sent over a ham for us to enjoy.  Pop said we definitely enjoyed it and he also said that congregation knew we didn’t have anything and they were very good to us more than just this instance.

o    I had to get a physical before starting school and I had a “hydrocele” problem which is an issue in the groin area. Usually these go away quickly for newborn children and require no action.  But mine was worse for whatever reason and I had to have a minor surgery to correct it.  Now this was the early 60’s so I went into the hospital the day prior to surgery and then stayed one day after.  My son had the same issue and in the 90’s it was a day surgery with just a small bandage and stitches that dissolved.  I had a giant bandage and stitches that had to be removed weeks later.  I wasn’t a good patient in the hospital as I lost control of my bodily functions while under sedation and I messed on everything which was embarrassing.  After the surgery, I would show everyone my bandage including strangers at the grocery story, post office, and anywhere else we happened to be.  That was embarrassing to my mom but worse, all this show and tell made my bandage grimy and when they took the stitches out, the hospital staff was in horror about the shape of the bandage.  I was a kid and a boy so I was into everything.  I’m sure they told my parents to keep me calm with little activity while I healed. Yeah.  That didn’t work.

Clarkson

o   We moved to Clarkson from Litchfield while I was still in the 1^st grade and I don’t remember much about that short stay there except that every night we had reconstituted milk, beans and cornbread for supper.  Every night. Mom told me I used to say, “Ah, beans again?” but I think they were cheap and provided good nourishment.  I remember that Lisa did not eat all her beans and would hide them along the sides of her plate to pretend that she had a clean plate. But Mom found out and admonished us.  I remember mom telling us that we were having beans again because we had to and although I lamented, I was definitely not hiding any food.

o         When we moved to Clarkson, I had to ride a school bus instead of walking to school like I had done at Litchfield and after school was over my first day, I got on the first available bus I guess thinking it would take me home.  Obviously, it was the wrong bus so the driver took me back and when I got there, my regular bus driver had reported to the principal that I was not on their bus, so the principal was looking for me. He was a little freaked out because he couldn’t contact the bus drivers via cell phone; they didn’t exist.  He took me home that day but made sure I knew the number of the bus I was supposed to get on the next day.  The next day he was there to make sure I got on the correct bus.   Mom was glad to see me because I was very late getting home she was very worried.

Kingswood

o   The last move in the 1^st grade was to Kingswood and so I changed schools again and went to Hardinsburg elementary.   I stayed at that school until moving to the farm in Meade County in the 7^th grade.  Kingswood is where I start to remember quite a few things as I got a little older.  We moved into a rent house owned by Mr. Mosser; an English teacher at Breckenridge County High School and it was a two-story house across from an apple orchard. We stayed at Kingswood until I was finished 3^rd grade.

o   The front yard at Kingswood had lots of shade trees and one of the jobs me and Phillip had was “picking up sticks.”  We would pick up the yard as we liked to say and when our Grandpa Powers was there, he would tell stories and I liked listening to them.  We only had three TV stations, no internet, no cell phones, and little information on things so listening to his stories were both entertaining and informative.  It was here I first remember him telling mom about Juanita leaving dad and he said, “if she had a wreck right in front of the house and her car was on fire, I would not lift a finger to save her.”  He was still mad and had quite an attitude that affected me.  He also told the story about being in WWI, getting mustard gassed, taking messages to the front lines, and getting discharged.  These probably don’t sound like much now but at the time, being so young, with a dearth of information, these were fascinating stories 

o   We decided to have a garden at Kingswood and we had quite a big area for one. I remember we had snap beans, butter beans, carrots, and such but the main thing I remember is potatoes. My dad planted several rows of potatoes to make sure we’d have enough for the winter and boy did they flourish.  There was a stand-alone garage building at Kingswood and we used that building to store potatoes.  I am not sure how many bushels we had but to a small child, I’m guessing 100 bushels or so.  I remember that dad kept a few of the potatoes back as “seed potatoes” and let the eyes grow and he prepared them for the next years planting. Plus, he had plenty to give to others around him which enriched his popularity with the locals.

o   The Kingswood property had a barn on it which was great fun for me.  We played there many, many times.  The barn had a loft with a door on it for putting hay in the loft.  I talked a playmate into jumping from the loft onto the grass.  I told him the grass would provide a soft landing.  It didn’t and he limped home while I got in trouble with my mom and dad.  I asked my dad to put up a basketball hoop on the barn which he did and he put a coffee can on the barn with a nail through the bottom so I could pitch rubber balls toward it.  He told me that when I could hit that coffee can all the time, I could play little league well.  I tired of trying to do that fairly quickly.  Somehow, I got the idea that I could use the rafters in the barn, tie a grass string to them, and swing on the grass strings like Tarzan which I had probably watched on TV.  I tied the string to the rafters and they hung down like I had planned. I tried it a few times and my hands kept slipping on the grass string impeding my progress so I decided to make a loop with the grass string that I could hold onto better.  Only problem was I used a slip knot on the loop so the weight of my body caused the loop to tighten.  When this happened, I tried to get my hand out of the knot and I got it all out except my little finger.  Luckily, I hit the ground before the knot snapped my little finger off.  But it left a significant circle injury around my little finger and it hurt like heck all the time but I knew if I told my mom and dad, I would get in trouble so I didn’t tell them.  I still have the scar at the base of my little finger on my right hand today. 

o   Behind Mr. Mosser’s house was a series of cliff’s that people climbed and below those cliff’s was a small lake which my dad and I fished in.  We used worms and cane poles to fish and we caught a bunch of sun fish which we took back home and had for supper.  It’s amazing what kids remember and find important and this was an important event for me.  It was just me and dad which didn’t happen much with us three kids and then two more of his and mom’s.  Special!

o   Right across from our house was an apple orchard and I remember those trees being sprayed with tractors and giant sprayers.  That freaked me out a little and I’m sure nothing about it was environmentally safe or managed like today.  I do remember us sneaking over and gathering apples for the family.   As an aside, my dad was fixing to go to work one day and always left his car in the driveway unlocked.  But one night someone came and tried to steal it.  He had taken the keys so they couldn’t get it started and instead, put it in neutral and let it roll deep into the apple orchard.  When he went outside to go to work, the vehicle wasn’t there so he called the sheriff, made a report, and got a ride to work. While he was at work, the sheriff called and said they’d found his car in the apple orchard.  It was not damaged so they drove it out of the orchard and back to the house!

o   In the back yard at Kingswood, there was a back tractor tire that had dirt in the bottom for flowers.  But us kids used to bounce on that tractor tire for hours at a time.  That tire was like a swing set for us. 

o   It was a Kingswood that I learned to wash and dry dishes.  I was too short to reach the sink so mom had us stand on a chair to help her do this job.  After a while, it just became normal for us to do this chore and it was part of the learning to work process.  I was not good at it and when I did badly, mom would give the dishes back to me to try again.  I learned that I needed to do that right the first time.

o   One time all of us kids got sick and I’m not sure if we had a bug or if it was something we ate but all three of us were sick standing at the top of the stairs crying about an upset stomach.  My dad was saying, “just get down here” because there wasn’t any bathroom upstairs so I’m sure he was going to take us to the one downstairs.  But we didn’t make it.  We wouldn’t come down, all three of us crying, and finally we threw up all over him.  It was a huge mess and I can remember one of us kids walking down to him but throwing up on his arms before we could get to him.  After that, the other two children threw up as well.  Probably sympathy puke.  Whatever it was, we felt better after throwing up but I’m not sure my dad did.

o   I was waiting for the school bus to arrive and it was raining like crazy so I was on a porch at a house across from where the school bus picked us up.  When the bus arrived, all of us kids started moving toward it and I decided to take a circuitous route and avoid the straight line of kids.  Mistake.  I fell into a ditch beside the road that was filled with water and I was wet from head to toe.  Worse, all the kids on the bus laughed their heads off.  The entire scene was totally embarrassing.  I couldn’t go to school in that shape so I’d have to go home and get changed.  But I had a better idea and that was to just hide instead and then go home when the kids were dropped off at the end of the day. Good idea except I was soaked from head to toe and I was in the 1st grade and I was terrible at hiding.  There was a church right across from the bus stop and I thought I’d wait there where it was dry.  Fortunately, the church preacher saw me and admonished me for trying to play hooky.  He took me home where I changed clothes and then mom took me to school a little late.

o   Dan Mosser’s brother moved into Dan’s house with him for a short while and that man had daughters.  There was a barn and a corral with horses on their place so they decided to ride one day.  They invited my sister Lisa to ride with them and she did.  They were good to us and inclusive of Lisa which I liked.  One day though, a horse got away from one of the girls riding it and ran into the barn helter skelter.  Horses routinely did this because that’s where the water and food was. Anyway, this horse went into the barn and knocked off one of the girls off at the door because the door was just high enough for the horse and not horse and rider.  Thank goodness everyone was ok.

o   Sheila and Peggy came to visit and Sheila was an epileptic had an epileptic seizure in the front yard under our big trees.  I had never seen such and thing and I freaked out.  Peggy was calm and had me go get mom.  Peggy said, “oh, she’s just having a seizure.  It’s what she does.  Go get mom.”  I did but there was nothing anyone could do until it was over.  The medication she was using did not stop those seizures at that time although they did later.

o   No one locked doors or anything like that when I was a kid.  My dad would normally leave the keys in the ignition of his car.  I asked him why he did that and he said, “Someone might need it.”  I think he was kidding but this is just the way things were back then.  One night, we were watching TV and had the door shut when someone raised a window from the outside and mom thought they were coming in the house.  Dad had provided mom with a gun but the ammo was in a different location and mom didn’t put ammo in it when intruders started to enter.  She started yelling for my grandfather and the people fixing to come in left thank goodness. My grandfather went out to the front porch with the gun mom previously had.  He was fixing to shoot up in the air to scare people but the gun had no ammo in it so click, click, click.  He said, “I’m glad I did not need it.”  Kentucky. 

o   Mom made a bedroom nice and girly for Lisa then made her sleep in it.  This was traumatizing for Lisa because she’d slept with me (and Phillip when we were together) for her entire life.  She was terrified and she hated that room and hated mom for making her sleep there.  She snuck into our room from time to time which was forbidden but she did it anyway.  We were little kids then and I enjoyed it when she came in; the three of us were pretty close and we wanted to be near each other.

o   When we were in Kingswood, the bookmobile came and we could check out books and read them at our house.  This is what people did before the internet where information is easily accessible.  We were thrilled because technology came to us in the hinterlands.  I checked out Curious George and Henry Huggins and I read a lot.  It was an escape and a window into a world I did not know existed. I remember crawling under the middle of a desk to read these books for hours.

o   One Christmas, me and Phillip got guns, holsters, and cowboy hats which is what boys got I suppose. Lisa got a doll and she hated it. She wanted to play cowboys and Indians with me and Phillip since we were her playmates but the dolls didn’t fit in with what we were doing and she got really mad.  She told me, “You got gun, holsters, and cowboy hats and I got a stupid doll.”  She eventually gave the doll to Peggy which hurt mom’s feeling because mom was just trying to be nice.  One day, we were playing and I threw my gun off to the side for some reason and it broke in half.  End of cowboy and Indians for me!

o   Mom had to have surgery on her veins so my dad took her to Lexington for surgery by the College of Medicine students.  Cheap.  During one surgery she had 20 feet of colin taken out in an experimental surgery they used in Nepal where my dad said that herders would take sheep to graze in the mountains but could not relieve themselves because the mountain was holy ground.  Because they held excrement, they had problems with their colin’s and hence, the surgery was needed.  It was not routinely needed in the US so when Mom needed it, it was unusual, free, and done at a teaching hospital.   Later, she had to have the veins in her legs stripped and they cut her poor legs to pieces; she had stitches all over her legs and those marks were evident until the day she died.  Grandpa Powers stayed with us kids during the surgery and he got mad at us for using too much jelly on toast.  He said we just needed a little for flavor and not so much.  I’d never thought about too much or too little jelly on toast until then.  Grandpa did not suffer fools gladly and he did not put up with foolishness.  I was personally scared of him and did as he asked.

o   There was a piano in our house at Kingswood and on Easter morning, there were 3 Easter baskets sitting on the top of the piano.   How cool.  Lisa questioned Mom about how one Easter Bunny could make it around the whole world in one night.  Mom tried to keep her believing, but she wasn't buying it. The Easter Bunny was dead to her at age 5. But we were happy about having Easter baskets and candy!

o   We were very poor and Lisa lost her lunch card at school and we didn't have the money to replace it.  She was sent to school with a package of 4 crackers for lunch.  I felt sorry for Lisa but it was what it was and since we were on different lunch schedules, I couldn’t share and I doubt I would have anyway because I was (a) selfish and (b) a hungry boy.  Poor Lisa!

o   We attended church at Pilgrim Holiness which was the church nearest to where we lived. We knew the preacher and his family pretty well.  One day, the oldest daughter and her friend showed Lisa how people "made babies".  One girl lay on the grass - face up while the other girl laid on top facing her and the one on top moved back and forth.  It was a demonstration-performance, I guess. Lisa thought they were stupid and when she told me about it, I thought it was stupid as well.  Nothing came of it but was our first introduction to sex, I guess.  We didn’t take the lesson very well because we were too young.  There was a missionary who came to the church to share his witness and ask for money to continue his work.  He was doing missionary work in Africa and showed us where he was by shooting an air dart through a tube onto a map where the location of the country, he was in. This was dangerous of course but very cool although we could not give him any money.  We were too poor and dad was more into the bank of Powers than a missionary in Africa.

Farm at Freedom

o   We moved to the Farm at Freedom when I was about to start 4th grade.  We ate whatever came out of the garden and had no money for anything else during the early years of their marriage but dad told me later that they bought the 30-acre farm with a farmhouse for $13,000 and they had saved half of the money to put down on the farm. No wonder we didn’t have anything at Kingswood!  After they moved, dad decided he needed some cows so he went to the cattle auction at Garfield and purchased a herd that didn’t sell during the auction.  He made a deal and brought the herd home to our farm.  I believe there were about 30 cows (for 30 acres!) in the herd.  The farm also had a tobacco base and since I had never been on a farm before, I didn’t know what all that amounted to.  But I learned.  The tobacco was already planted when we purchased the farm and the state came out and make sure we didn’t plant more than allowed according to our tobacco base.  The base then was as much tobacco as you could grow on your base acreage.  Ours was about an acre which was quite a bit.  Soon Kentucky went to a poundage base meaning you were only allowed to sell so many pounds which cured a lot of issues.  But this first year, it was acreage base so we could sell as many pounds as we grew on that acreage.  I think we sold about 5000 pounds that year at $.50 a pound which was a LOT of money for us.  We had a small tractor that we used for everything and we purchased gasoline with dye in it for farm use only.  If it was used on vehicles instead, the engine would turn the color of the dye and you’d get busted.  We never did that but back then, gasoline was less than $.20 per gallon so affordable.

o   We had a chicken house near the farm house and that’s where all the chickens were fed and kept.  We had a door fixed so the chickens could get out if they wanted but no critters could get in.  Weasels would kill the chickens and one of them would pull their head off and drink their blood….like vampires I suppose.  My dad said this was a serious issue that had to be managed. Others would kill the chickens and eat the meat.  We didn’t want anything to get our chickens because we needed the eggs and we wanted to kill and fry them for Sunday dinner.  I remember one Saturday night, dad got a chicken out of the chicken coop, put it on a block of wood and cut its head off then threw it on the ground.  That chicken ran around with no head for quite a few seconds until finally dropping dead.  That was gross but exciting for a kid.  After the chicken was dead, we plucked it, gutted it, and gave it to mom so she could use it for Sunday dinner. 

o   One of our calves died and pop called the veterinarian out to see what the problem was.  Result:  Black Leg.  I don’t know what that was but it was bad, contagious, and deadly to cattle.   Dad got all the calves up and vaccinated them for Black Leg then we burned the dead calf where it laid.  When I say burn, I mean we had a giant bon fire that burned that calf totally; that is what the vet said to do and that is what we did.

o   We got our first milk cow who we named “Moosey” at Freedom and my dad taught me to milk a cow.  He said to put your head in a place where they could not kick and then reach down and milk.  Each teat has a reservoir and the cow has four teats.  You milk two at a time and you milk until the reservoir is dry. A good milk cow will give about 5 gallons of milk two times a day so our family had plenty of milk.  This work made my arms strong with huge muscles around my elbow on each arm.  Until this time, we’d been drinking government milk which is milk powder you mixed with water to reconstitute the milk.  After this, we had our own milk so no more powered milk.  After milking, mom would strain it through a dish rag into a container and we’d drink out of that container.  No pasteurization or anything like that.  Cream would form on the top of the milk and we’d just mix it in and drink away or we’d scoop it off and give it to the hogs.  I suppose we could have made butter from the cream but all of us kids preferred margarine so we never did that.  10 gallons a day of milk was more than we could drink obviously so we’d give the rest to the hogs and they really loved it.  In fact, they would fight over it, biting each other and squealing loudly over it.  That was a sight to see and when they saw us coming to pour the milk into their troughs, they’d start hollering and fighting right then. 

o   I started 4H and I was supposed to have a dairy cow that I could halter up and show.  We got Moosey artificially inseminated so she would have a full breed Guernsey calf.  When the calf was born, I named it “Patricia” after my mom.  I was trying to honor her but naming a cow after your mom was probably not that good an idea, I learned several years later.  But I named all the cows after people I knew like Dad’s sisters.  We had one mean cow and, before I knew she was mean I named her “Geraldine” after Aunt Gerry.  Good grief.  Anyway, Patricia the calf grew up and I was too busy and too lazy to train her on the halter.  When cows were “bulling”, they would mount each other to signal they were ready for breeding.  Then we’d put the bull with the heard and they’d all get bred for the next calf season.  Patricia started bulling her first time and my Grandpa Powers said we’d better put her up in the barn for a while.  I did not and she got pregnant very early in life. This caused her to never grow into a full-size dairy cow and she never became a dairy cow.  She was just one of the beef cattle heard from then on.  She had several calves for years until I left home so she ended up being a good cow and a good mom.

o   We butchered hogs and my dad said we were going to use “everything but the squeal.” When hogs were butchered, they rendered lard from them which we used to cook with; it was our shortening.  Each time we butchered a hog, they butcher house would send the lard in metal buckets we would use to hold the lard but later, we’d clean them out and use them for many other things.

o   We raised an acre of Burley Tobacco from the time we got the farm in Freedom until I left for the Air Force.  When you raise tobacco, and I didn’t learn this until later in life, there are lots of steps you have to take and I did all of them as a kid.  At this point in my life, I was only involved in a few steps and one of them was stripping tobacco.  This is the process of taking tobacco off of sticks hanging in the barn and putting it into bulks when it is raining so the leaves are moist and don’t crush when they are handled. Then you strip the leaves off the stalk; one person getting the lower leaves called trash, then moving the stalk to the next person who takes lugs, then the next takes leaf, then the last person takes tips and throws the stalks into another stack.  We use the stalks as fertilizer and would spread them all over the farm.  We stripped tobacco during the winter and it was cold!  I was learning the stripping operation but I was pretty whiney and complained all the time about being cold.  All the other workers were working feverishly trying to do the job when one of them said, “Well, I’ll bet your mouth is not cold.”  Embarrassed me badly.  He shut me up and I never complained again.

o   Another cash crop we grew were cucumbers.  We called these “pickles” because that’s what the cucumbers were going to be used for, I suppose. We had a field on top of the hill at our farm and we grew an acre of pickles.  We had to buy seeds from the distributor then plant them in rows. When they started blooming, pickles would come soon.  The growing season didn’t last too long so maybe three weeks and the pickles were done but we’d pick in the morning, put them in 5-gallon buckets and then move them to grass sacks and one morning pick would fill the back of a truck with sacks so a lot of cucumbers harvested.  We’d take the grass sacks to the sorting unit which sorted the pickles by size.  The smaller ones brought the most money by pound and the larger ones the least but they would sort and weigh them and then give us a check right then. It was great!  One time, our cousin Larry and his wife Kathy came out to help us and Larry got on to me because I wasn’t working hard enough.  He yelled at me and got me going.  It seemed I got yelled at a lot as a kid probably because I deserved it.  Anyway, I remember that I got to work and shut my mouth.  I am sure he and my dad choreographed this and everything was reported back to my dad. 

o   We had a garden behind the house and it was about ½ acre.  I remember before we had a tractor that dad borrowed two mules which he used to till the ground.  He would say “gee” and “haw” to get them to go the direction he wanted. That garden was fabulous because it kept us in potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, strawberry’s all year because mom would can these fruits and vegetables for use throughout the winter.  I remember summers in the garden working our tails off.  Mom worked harder than everyone and she bent over at the waist to do her gardening and her blouse would ride up exposing two inches of her back which would get tanned.  That was a site to see but all of us had “farmer tans” which means that our face, necks, and arms just to just above the elbow would be tanned.  Probably looked weird but everyone else we knew had the same tan.

o   One time I was supposed to water Patricia and Moosey in the barn and my mom asked if I had done this.  I told her yes, I did even though I had not.  She went to the barn, picked up the watering trough and blew dust out of it.  I told her it was a dry day and they must have drunk all the water already.  Didn’t work.   She got a 1x1 inch hickory wood tobacco stick out, had me by one hand and I was going in a circle while she paddled me with that stick.  It really wasn’t hurting that badly but I was screaming bloody murder hoping she would soon stop.  The wind resistance for that stick was significant so she couldn’t get much speed and I was running in a circle away from the swats but I was hollering anyway.   We were in Freedom Hollow which we called Freedom “holler” and we only had one other family in the holler with us: the Compton’s. The patriarch of that family was called “Fatty” and you can guess why.  Fatty heard me hollering and thought something was wrong.  He opened the barn door and peered in and mom simply said, “he lied.”  Fatty didn’t say anything.  He reached over and got a 5-gallon bucket, turned it upside down, sat down, so he could watch the show.  To be sure, I lied again a time or two during my life but I understood the potential penalty because she taught me.

o   After work, my dad had to go out and get water for the hogs and we had a little pond where he could get water.  He had two 5-gallon buckets he was using for water and he asked me to go with him so I could use the flashlight.  I went dutifully but I wrongly believed if you needed to see, you needed the light shined it your eyes.  I thought that would be best for him.  He yelled, “Timmy, get that light out of my eyes.”  Then he stepped into the water because he couldn’t see where the dry land started and he was mad as fire.  I was devastated because I was just trying to do the right thing.

o   Because I asked and asked and asked (begged really), dad finally purchased a pony for me.  I wanted to ride it and ride it I did.  We had no bit; only a halter for the pony and had no saddle so bareback with a halter.  I took that pony across the road into a field and ran him up and down the field until he just quit running because I’d run his legs off. One day I was showing off to my cousins and had the pony in one of our fields and the cousins were at the barn.  So, I started coming back to the barn with the pony in a full gallop.  I started to pull back on the reins about 100 feet away from the barn but the pony did not respond.  He galloped up to the barn and just stopped about 5 feet away.  I came flying over the top of the pony, landed on my feet with the halter ropes in my hands, right in front of the barn gate.  My cousins were standing on the barn gate watching me and they were pretty impressed.  I acted like this was all normal and expected.  It’s just a wonder I didn’t get hurt that day those shenanigans.  

o   Our farmhouse did have running water but it was connected to a cistern underneath the Kitchen floor.  When the cistern ran out of water, we’d have to get some hauled in.  We never tried to dig a well but instead, dad said there was a spring we should try to tap into but I don’t think he was serious. There was a spring behind the garden but it never amounted to anything.  Mr. Compton had a well with a hand pump at his house so I am sure there was underground water.  When we moved in, the cistern provided water to the kitchen and one hose bib outside. We had an outhouse for using the bathroom and a zinc wash tub for taking baths.  Because of limited water, we all used the same water for taking a bath in that tub.  First dad, then mom, then us kids.  You can imagine how bad that water looked after seven of us used it.  After a while, my dad decided to add on to the house and he built a new front room and a bathroom from Fort Knox barracks lumber and it was great.  An indoor bathroom!   

o   We played baseball right beside our house in a field with the cows.  I think we had a rubber ball but we threw to batters and if they missed, the ball would go through the barbed wire fence into the briar patch across the road.  No telling how many times I went into that briar patch after the ball.  But everyone got good at hitting because no one wanted to go chase the ball and interrupt the game.  We played baseball for hours and hours in that field.  Then my dad put up a basketball hoop above the barn doors for us to use.  We did use it some but it was so high for everyone that we mostly stuck with baseball which was more achievable for playing successfully.

o   The Compton’s were the only family in the hollow with us.  It was called “Dead Horse Holler”. The Compton’s I dealt with the most were the father who everyone called “Fatty” and I have no idea what his real name was.  He was country as could be and wore overalls and, in the summer, had no shirt; he was a sight to see.  He had two boys that I looked up to and knew fairly well.  The oldest was Bobby and he went to the Vietnam War but returned home and I remember he bought a 1965 Mustang convertible which was cool.  The youngest was Roy and he was about 5 years older than me which as a child, it a lot of difference.  Roy could do anything and dad liked him a lot because he would help us and he worked hard.  When he grew up, Roy was working on a water tower without fall protection and fell from the tower.  He hit the ground and appeared to be fine but he eventually got pale and they rushed him to the hospital where he died.  Had a torn aorta. 

o   My dad hated animals in the house and when he came home from working a midnight shift, he was tired and wanted to sleep. One early morning, pop was in his sleep wear and I think he’d just come off a midnight shift.  He found a cat in the house and took it outside and football kicked it over the power lines.  Us kids got the message; no animals in the house.  The cat let out a loud meow as it flew into the air and back down but it landed on its feet and was ok after the event. None of us kids said a thing because we knew he was mad as heck.

o   One day when we were at the barn, my mom was milking the cow and I guess I had been asking questions about the birds and the bees.  Mom carefully but considerately told me how all that happened. Freaked me the hell out.  I guess I wanted to know but after I knew, I didn’t want to know any more.  That was burned into my memory; I learned something I really didn’t want to know about yet. Mom also tried to explain the facts of life to Lisa by using the cows and the bull as examples.  Lisa didn't get it.  She knew how COWS got pregnant but not people.  I know this was an awkward time for both me and Lisa but I’m glad my mom told us these things.  Dad would never have done that and no telling how we would have found out if she hadn’t explained it.

o   One day Lisa was trying to give my sister Rebekah a bath.  Rebekah was tiny then, just walking, and mom was in the outside laundry room doing laundry.  I’m not talking about a washer and dryer like today.  We had no dryer so we’d put all clothes on the clothes lines.  Our washer was an old pot belly washer with wringers at the top. Anyway, Rebekah came out of the house stark naked screaming that Lisa was trying to give her a bath which mom told her to do.  Lisa had this exasperated look on her face like she was trying to do as she was told but Rebekah would not participate.  Mom stopped doing laundry and got Rebekah back in the house so she could take a bath.  I’m pretty sure Mom gave her a bath and Lisa sat idly by seething. 

o        My sister Lou-Ann was playing in the front yard with our dog Hobo one morning.  Hobo was a German Shephard dog but very protective of all us kids.  Lou-Ann was playing with him when he bit her.  He didn’t so much bite her as he put his teeth around her face until she let go of him.  Evidently, she had watched me milk the cow and decided she was going to milk Hobo the same way.  Didn’t work out very well for her and she tried that no more.

o   My dad bought a barracks at Fort Knox with some of his friends from work and he brought a lot of that lumber back to the farm and put it in big stacks.  These were before the days of asbestos testing and so forth so it was pretty much the wild, wild west.  He bought the entire 2-story, 100-foot-long barracks for $16.  Had to bid on it which he did and he was the low bid.  Had so many days to get the structure down and cleaned off so they could build new modern barracks.  Those barracks were made from 100% lumber and he got the structure down and moved off in the allotted time.  The result for me was piles and piles of lumber than had to be, what we called, “de-nailed,” and restacked.  I spent two years de-nailing boards and we used a lot of that lumber on the new house we eventually built on the big farm.  But a lot of that lumber we burned for heat; especially the parts that were broken and unusable.  I know a lot of wood burned was oak tongue and groove flooring.  Ugh.  We continued to buy barracks and tear them down in preparation for building a house.   One time I went out to de-nail board and forgot to change into my work boots so went out there with the tennis shoes I wore to school. Of course, I stepped on a nail and had to get a tetanus shot.  I was explaining everything to dad after he got home from work and I was expecting a little sympathy for my pain but he got angry with me and told me to wear my work boots from now on. Then back out to de-nailing boards I went.  No sympathy for me.  No quarter.

o   At Freedom mom had to go to the hospital for colin surgery.  She had to have several feet of colin removed and resected.  After surgery, she had to be careful even though there were five children to see about.  A little while after she healed, Lou-Ann had to be rushed to the hospital with a significant fever.  As mom and dad were getting everything ready, Lou-Ann was so calm and respectful to everyone trying to help her.   I think she loved the attention.  I believe at this time, we learned she had epileptic tendencies which had to be managed. Lou-Ann always believed that others were here to serve her and I believe that started with this event.

o   I was a bad kid and I decided, since my dad smoked at that time, that I should smoke as well.  So, I stole some of his cigarettes and lit them upstairs.  My mom smelled smoke and came upstairs to check on things and she found the cigarette’s.  Worse, I had caught the mattress on fire (we didn’t have beds only mattresses) and it was smoldering.  Mom put the fire out then dad, when he got home from work, addressed the smoking and fire things.  Wasn’t pleasant I can promise you.

o   My cousins Duncan and Rusty were coming down to the farm and I thought it would be funny if I tied metal trucks to the electric fence then talked my cousins into going and getting them down.  I did and they did.  They, of course, got shocked by the electric fence and went crying to their mom.  Then my dad got me and explained why that was inappropriate.  That also wasn’t pleasant for me.

o   Denny was my cousin from Louisville and his mother was Aunt Gerry.  Denny came down to the farm each summer for several years and one year, one of his friends just showed up at our house.  No notice, no warning, no preview of his coming; just showed up.  He had written Denny and told him when he would be there, where he should be picked up from the bus stop, etc. But Denny forgot to tell us about this so his friend got off the bus and walked to our house which was about 5 miles away.  We made a big deal about having a visitor and mom treated him like royalty, dad introduced him to everyone and basically put on the dog.

o   We lived in a holler (a hollow) which was lower than everything around us.  Right above our house was a gravel road up to the church and the school bus stop which was curvy and circuitous.  Alternatively, we could take a trail straight up the hill through the woods which we usually did.  We caught the school bus up there every day of school and it would let us off each afternoon.  The church was right across from the school bus turnaround so if the weather was bad, we would just go to the church. The doors were unlocked so us and the Compton’s would get in there to avoid rain or cold. Between the church and the holler was a graveyard which we could not avoid.  Freaked me out be advised. Anyway, our church was so small that we only had a part-time preacher. He came every other week and the off week he went to a nearby church; they had the same part-time arrangement.  Our preacher, when he got to preaching hot and heavy would end each major word with the “ah” sound.  So, the Lordah went to Galeah, etc.  Was weird.  But the Sunday School teachers were great to me and I appreciated that.  Was a lot of fun. 

o   During Easter Sunday, we had an Easter Egg hunt and for a kid who had never experienced such a thing, this was a great experience.  There was one big egg and inside it was a bunch of candy and whoever found it, got to keep it.  I found it and I was so proud!  Before church started about 50 people came through the woods riding horses like back in the old days.  I suppose it was some pilgrimage but for a child of 8, it was quite a big deal.  All those people joined in our service and the church could hardly hold us all. 

o   We were coming home from Church one day and all of us piled into a two-door vehicle.  I know it was two doors because as 7 people piled into the car and the kids got into the back, Lou-Ann had her hand on the post and mom though we were all seated already so she closed the door on Lou-Ann’s hand.  Lou-Ann said, “Oh, oh, my hand, my hand” in a calm voice so mom opened the door to get her hand out.  I asked mom how LuAnn reacted like that and she said it was just the way Lou-Ann was.  I told her if that was Rebekah, she would have screamed bloody murder.  Mom totally agreed. 

o   In the 4^th grade, I was supposed to learn my multiplication tables but I failed to do so.  Mom asked me what 8 x 8 was in the garden and I didn’t know.  My teacher said if we didn’t learn them, she would give us a bad grade.  Dad always said if you get in trouble at school, you would be in major trouble at home.  So, my teacher asked me what 8x8 was and again, I didn’t know so she gave me a failing grade.  A big fat F she said.  I was afraid my dad was going to take it very hard so I decided to “run off.”  And run off I did.  There was a gas pipeline that cleared a path behind our farm so I decided to take that.  Not sure where I was going because I didn’t plan that far ahead. When I came up missing, the whole countryside was looking for me.  I was missing about 3 hours, got onto the main gravel road to Garfield about 5 miles away from where I started and I heard a car coming so I got behind some trees but evidentially stepped out and was spotted, secured, and taken back home. To be truthful, it was getting dark and I was kind of glad to be found.  When I got home, I was expecting to be punished severely but I was not.  Fatty Compton was the first person I saw and he asked me if I was all right.  I got emotional and so did he.  I was shocked by that.  Then my dad came out and gave me a big hug. He said he was so happy to have found me and so happy I was ok.  He too was very emotional.  He told me I’d have to learn my multiplication tables and he’d help me; which he did and I learned them very well; I found they really weren’t difficult; I just had to bear down and learn them.   Later that night, Bobby and Roy Compton cornered and killed a rabid fox near our house.  That is one major reason why everyone was so frantic to find me.

o   Many people in Kentucky used to grow Sorghum and use it to make sorghum for sweetener in other foods.  To make sorghum syrup in those days, you’d take the sorghum stalks and run the through a mashing mill to take all the liquid out.  The mill was run by two horses going in circles.  Then the liquid was put into a table where it was cooked slowly and eventually put into containers for individuals.  I was helping get the stalked mashed and I thought it would be fun to work at the table a while so I started stirring the mixture back and forth slowly.  The man cooking the sorghum got on my butt and told me to put the paddles down and get back to stalk mashing which I did dutifully.  But that was a fascinating operation; I’ll bet that’s not how they make sorghum syrup today!  Dad told me the sorghum cooker was a man from Germany who had immigrated years back and was previously a farmer.  After retiring from farming, he started making sorghum for everyone as his side gig. 

o   Grandpa Powers was with us a great deal of the time because Mom was in the hospital with her colin issues.  As soon as Lisa could get away from him, she would run down to the Compton's to meet up with their girls and they would play in the woods at a place we called "Scary Island."  It as an area of land that at some point in the past had been raised higher because water had washed away the dirt around it.   They used grass strings and sticks to stake out rooms and then played house.  This is what kids did in the 60s’; played outside and make up their own games using whatever they had.

o   Lisa had to cook a great deal because Mom was always helping dad and I believe she preferred helping dad to inside work.  Lisa had to wash dishes and clean and she put her shoes into mom’s high heels so she could better reach the sink.  Grandpa Powers would get mad because she washed the dishes but didn’t wipe off the counters, table or stove very well.   She had to wash dishes after dinner and the rest of us would be watching tv shows like Star Trek while she was stuck washing dishes.   Then Rebekah would sashay into the kitchen and say, "Mom said you need to fix me some cereal."  Lisa would get so mad but couldn’t say anything or she would get in trouble so she chose to stand there with her with her arms tight, her face hateful and she would swing her arms toward her but not hit her.  Rebekah then grabbed Lisa’s arm and dug her fingernails into her arm.  Lisa still has scars to this day.  Lisa retains bad feelings about all of this because me, her and Phillip were told to eat whatever was in front of us but Rebekah and Lou-Ann were exempt from this requirement.

o   Once, dad sprayed the yard for bugs and he told us not to go in the yard because there was poison on the grass and it would kill us if it got on us. Lisa, of course, forgot this warning and ran into the yard like she did every day.  Then she remembered the warning dad gave her.  She went to tell him what happened and to figure out what to do.  Dad was talking to Fatty Compton and they were in deep conversation and she could not get his attention.  So, she went to Mom crying and totally believing she was going to die because she violated the rule and got on the poison grass.  Mom asked what was wrong and Lisa told her she thought she was going to die because she accidentally walked on the grass.  Mom marched her to the front porch, where dad and Mr. Compton were talking, and she made dad tell her she was going to be fine which he did.  One of my dad’s eye winked when he was tickled at something and it was winking like crazy right then.

o   Lisa and Peggy would stand on the porch and sing Beatles' songs like "I Wanna Hold Your Hand."  They were so cute doing that.  When she was there Sheila would sometimes have another of her seizures which freaked everyone but Peggy out. One time Peggy was wearing a "fall" (fake hair addition) while the girls were playing Chinese Jump Rope.  Lisa accused Peggy of cheating but Peggy denied it and they got into a hair-pulling fight.  Lisa thought she was really hurting pegging but she was just pulling on Peggy’s fake hair.

o   Lisa tells a story about a wildcat who got on the roof above the kitchen at night from time to time.  We had an outhouse then so had to walk to it.  When the wildcat was around, Mom would take us just outside the back door to pee so we didn’t have to walk far from the house to the outhouse.   

o   We got gasoline for the tractor and that gas had dye in it so it couldn’t be used for vehicles.  The gasoline was pumped into a tank on a stand and the tank was 6 feet above the ground.  For some reason, I got on top of the tank and straddled it while it was being filled.  That was all cool except that the fumes from the gasoline came through the one filler hole and I was right above that.  I remember I got woozy as heck and my dad had to get me down.  When he got me down, I was walking around like I was drunk and I felt awful.  Never did that again and I am not sure why it was allowed the first time.

o   We had a shed behind the house and one side held the washing machine for laundry and the other side was storage and I think we had a box freezer in there.  It would get messy in there as we would just throw stuff in until dad decided we should straighten it up.  One day, he told me and Larry to clean it out while he was at work so off, we went.  Whenever we butchered hogs, we’d get all the meat plus cans of lard back.  Mom would use the lard when she cooked and when she needed more in the house, we’d get some from the cans in the shed.  When we were out there to straighten it up, there were two lard cans in the shed and we assumed they were full and when full those cans were heavy so me and Larry each got on a side and counted down to full effort.  3, 2, 1, lift!  I lifted my side up and then Larry lifted it 7 feet in the air and took it out of my hands.  Empty!

o   My dad was always cutting brush on the farm to clean it up and one time he and mom went to the back of the farm to cut some.  Mom told me that they would cut the brush up into fireplace size pieces so they could be used for firewood.  She found a piece of wood that needed to be cut and held it between her hands so my dad could cut it with a chain saw.  Not good.  Mom said the chain got hung up on the wood and pulled her toward it.  She let go thank goodness so no one got hurt but dad turned the chain saw off and they talked about working safely from then on.  They were ultra-safe after that in all things on the farm; not only at Freedom but at the big farm to come.  That story makes me queasy to tell. 

o   We were building an extension on the house which was to include a bathroom.  An indoor bathroom!  Me and Denny were working on the framing while everyone else was gone and we found a wasp nest on the frame my dad had built a few weeks ago.  We decided to do what we did every time we found a wasp nest before.  We decided to get some gasoline, put it in a sprayer, and spray the wasp nest down.  The gasoline was heavy so the wasps couldn’t fly and would soon die after being covered and it always worked.  So, I got the sprayer and climbed up so I could spray the wasps while Denny was directing me on where they were from the ground. When I got in the right place, I pressed the wand and zapped the nest and the wasps.  It was all good.  Except that I sprayed Denny too.  Got gasoline all over his pants.  Wasn’t too bad until the gasoline started affecting his groin area and he quickly came out of his jeans and underwear and started running around air drying his junk.  I was trying not to laugh but it was a pretty funny sight. He soon dried out, put on new clothes, put his gas-soaked clothes in the washer, and we got back to work but he admonished me for spraying him and gave clear directions for future endeavors of this sort.  But we killed the wasps, removed their nest, and made way for additional work.

o   Dad and Fatty went to Louisville to sell the tobacco crop and Roy worked at the tobacco warehouse. When the tobacco sold, it was like an auction with several companies bidding on individual tobacco batches.  When they came to ours Roy would say, I need a little help on this one and the price would go up a few pennies per pound. Might not sound like much but we had 4000 pounds so every little bit helped!  After the crop was sold, my dad and Fatty when to eat breakfast at a local establishment.  Fatty had dressed up which means he had a tee shirt on under his overalls.  After breakfast, dad got the check and left a tip at the table.  He went up to pay the bill and Mr. Compton said in a loud voice, “Mr. ‘Pires’, you left some of your money on the table.”  Everyone in the establishment heard him and my dad, embarrassed as heck, when back to the table, retrieved the tip money, and left.  Poor waitress!  Mr. Compton had no idea about tipping. 

o   My mom and dad went to the hospital for some event so all us kids had to go stay with the Compton’s overnight.  They had about 6 children of their own plus 2 adults and 3 little kids staying withs them.  Their house only had four rooms and everyone slept in one bedroom.  It was crowded!  Me and Phillip were sleeping together but not yet asleep when Fatty began snoring and mean LOUD snoring.  He was snoring up a storm but then coughed and it sounded like a couple of hogs fighting.  Me and Phillip laughed and laughed before we eventually went to sleep ourselves. 

o   One day Fatty saw me and Phillip playing basketball on a goal attached to the barn and he said he wanted to play.  He said he didn’t want to run around so instead wanted to play a game of horse.  We, of course, said yes.  We went first and missed so Fatty got his turn and he banked in the first shot.  We missed.  Then he banked in the 2^nd.  And I don’t mean layups either.  These were shots.  He skunked us and laughed every time he made a shot.  He never missed and he banked each shot he took. That guy was amazing.  We wanted to play again but he said we better practice first then try again when we got better. 

New Farm in Meade County

o   Between the 6^th and 7^th grade, we bought a farm in 330-acre Meade County with Tommy Tucker for about $20K in the late 60’s.  The farm was previously owned by an Army Colonel and he was an absentee owner and the farm was in disarray; kind of grown up, fences in bad shape, a house on it that was barely livable, and the house was at the end of a small road and you got to it by going around a pond.  If it was raining, we parked on the other side of the pond and walked to the house.  Not far away but a pain in the butt.  We bought it with Tommy but he sold his half to Aunt Gerry and her friend Barbara Dowell.  We put a bunch of cows on the place and were working both the 30-acre farm in Freedom and the big farm in Meade County at Midway (midway between Brandenburg and Irvington I suppose) carrying equipment back and forth.  The cows got into paint buckets in a sink hole looking for salt to lick and it killed several of them.  We didn’t notice the cows for a few days because we didn’t go to the big farm every day and my dad, Aunt Gerry, and Barbara all had full time jobs at Olin Chemical and my dad had the little farm as well as barracks at Fort Knox to tear down so everyone was busy.  When we found the dead cattle, the three of them decided someone should be at the farm all the time so we worked on the house and moved there. This was a great time for me as I learned a lot, did a lot, made a lot of new friends, and started to grow up.

o   Me and Denny moved the old Harry Ferguson tractor from the Freedom farm to the Big Farm and we came through the back roads to do this because Denny didn’t yet have his driver’s license.   Between Webster and the farm there were several hills but one in particular would make you lose your stomach as you went over it.  Denny and I decided to go over that hill fast in the pickup pulling that tractor on a trailer behind us.  I don’t think we boom chained the tractor down but we did have the tractor in gear and the brakes set with some wheel chocks so we were good to go.  This was a 1967 truck so it didn’t even have seat belts.  Denny didn’t have his driver’s license yet so we were totally illegal as well as unsafe.   I talked Denny into going fast over the cool hill and he did.  The trailer came off the ground a little the tractor bounced around and the trailer swerved from side to side taking the truck with it moving us into the wrong side of the road several times.  Denny let off the accelerator and recovered but thank goodness no one was coming in the other direction.  It was really quiet in that truck the rest of the way to the farm.  That event scared us straight.  If someone had been coming, we’d have been goners; if that tractor had come off the trailer and/or we had wrecked and Denny with no license…….I don’t know what would have happened but it would have been bad.  When Denny talked to dad, he confessed what happened and that it scared the heck out of both of us.  From then on, Denny drove slowly and carefully and dad would say, “now Denny, don’t get the heavy foot.”  He didn’t need to; there was no way we would put ourselves in that position again.

o   The house on the 330-acre farm was an old Post Office and we had to fix it up before we moved it.  There were only two bedrooms so we had to build a third one, put paneling up over old sheetrock, update the bathroom, add electric wall heaters (unsafe I’m sure), fix the plumbing, and get it ready. My dad sold the farm at Freedom and made a good profit which he used on the new farm to help pay his part off, buy equipment, and build the cattle herd.  We had just updated the house in Freedom so this was a downgrade from what we had as far as houses go but the farm was gigantic and I was outside more than in so it was great for me.  The house was old and not very well insulated.  Dad put electric wall heaters in each room to help with keeping us warm and it’s a wonder we didn’t burn the house down.  Dad had to get under the house and wrap the pipes with tape that had electricity going through them to keep the pipes from freezing.  The tape had an electrical cord that came through a hole in the floor in the kitchen and we plugged it in when it was cold so we would have water and plumbing.

o   My dad had worked a midnight shift (12 pm to 8 am) and afterward, he was going to paint the exterior of the house.  We had put lapboard sheeting on the house during the remodel but it was unpainted which he was going to take care of.  When he was out there, he stepped on the head of a bull snake and it wrapped up around dad’s leg.  He hated snakes so he let out a scream, did a dance to get the snake off him, then went in the house and told mom all about it and that he wasn’t painting any more.  She went outside, got a hoe, killed the snake and told him to get back to painting.  He did.

o   When we moved to “The Farm” Lou-Ann was in the first grade in Breckenridge County and they decided she had mental issues and labeled her “retarded.”  She had knock knees and was pigeon toed so dad and mom decided to remove her from school, get surgery on her legs, and then start her in Meade County the next year.  When Lou-Ann had surgery, she had casts from her upper leg all the way down to and including her feet. She was in a wheel chair but she could raise her straight legs up and touch her nose with them.  Flexible!  Because Lou-Ann was in a wheel chair, she needed help when going to the bathroom so Lisa would have to pull her panties down over the cast, plop her on the toilet, wipe her off, pull her drawers up, then put her back in the wheel chair.  This was a tough go for Lisa and Lou-Ann treated her like her personal servant throughout this time.  When she got out of the casts, her feet were straight and no more knock knees!  She started school in Meade County the next year and was in the highest academic group (they grouped people by ability back then).  She eventually graduated High School in Meade County and then from Centre College.  So much for being retarded

o   I’m not sure where my parents were but my cousin Donna Carol came to visit us and all of us kids were in the house alone.  Rebekah had a friend over and they were about 6 years old.  Donna Carol and I were 7^th graders and we were experimenting as young sexual beings although nothing really happened.  Rebekah and her friend followed us everywhere anyway, so there was no way we were doing anything that couldn’t be told to our parents because they would have told no doubt.  Donna was adopted so it wasn’t like kissing cousins or normal Kentucky behavior!

o   Once before Easter, Donna Carol sent clothes to Lisa that Donna had outgrown. On Easter Sunday, Lisa decided she was going to wear a light orange suit she was sent.  It was very cold that Easter Sunday and the only tights in the house were bright red.  Mom convinced Lisa that the red and orange went together and she wore that combination to church.  I can feel every woman reading this to groan and say, “no, no no.”  Lisa says today, “I can’t believe you all let me wear that monstrosity to church.”  I don’t remember it looking bad; I just thought it was a fashion statement.  Hey, it was the late 60’s and there was a lot worse.

o   When I went to 7^th grade, I was the youngest person in the class by far but I was a new person going to a school where people were being consolidated from grade schools so everyone was new really.  That was a great event for me because for the first time, I wasn’t the only new kid coming to a school.  Everyone was becoming young adults and it was an interesting time.  I remember looking around in class one day and about 8 kids were scratching their pubic areas where hair was growing in and itching.  The first person I was attracted to was Beverly Collins. Back in that day, we called ourselves “going together” although we weren’t going anywhere.  That meant we were going steady but involved no kissing, a little hand holding, passing notes which were pretty benign (because if the teacher found them, she would read them out loud to the entire class) and such.   Beverly and I were “going together.”  Mom thought this was a silly distinction and always asked, “where you going?”  I didn’t know.  But we broke up and I had several other girlfriends in the 7^th and 8^th grade as I grew up.  I was obviously a catch!  Well, I was catch and release I suppose although I’m not sure who did the releasing; I just can’t remember.  

o   My first kiss with a girl was with Darlene Morgan at a get together around Ekron.  We were 7^th graders and sneaked off and played kissy face a few times and it was great.  We were both grinning from ear to ear.  She went to Ekron Baptist church with my family and there were lots of Morgan’s in the congregation.  They were all related and visited with one another after church and I went to Darlene’s parents’ house after church one Sunday and we played baseball in the field below the house.  I didn’t know who was a brother, sister, cousin or something else but everyone there was a Morgan except me. I made a couple of bare-handed catches and held my own in the festivities.  Me and Darlene “broke up” after that but I don’t remember why.  She was a good girl from a good family and had a good heart.  I always admired her.

o   I do remember that I started going with Donna Gaines and she was in the first group at school while I was in the second group.  The first group was the smart and popular kids and as I said previously, kids were grouped and taught according to academic skill.  Her group was the group we thought would go to college, play sports, and eventually run the world.  I went to Otter Creek with her and was exposed to a group of people I did not previously know which was illuminating and helpful.  My grandfather Embrey had died right before that trip and I was still sad. Donna asked me why I was blue and I told her.  We talked and talked that day; she was so smart and so helpful to me.  After Otter Creek, I had to get back for a little league baseball game and since I was the youngest in my class, I was one of the only ones still playing little league in that class.  Donna attended and I played great because I was playing in front of someone I was trying to impress.  Later in the year, we went to a sock hop dance together one evening and were dancing and whatever and we got hot and decided to sit beside a window to get some air.  Donna was amorous and got me going but nothing really happened so don’t get too excited.  We broke up right after that but probably because we were both wondering around finding mate after mate.   

o   I was a good student at school and I was one of the smartest in the second group.  This was fascinating to me because I never studied and never took any books home.  We had a study hall period and I used that time to do any homework that was due so when school was out I could focus on farm work and later, girls.  I never took any books home nor did any homework after school in high school either.  I’m really not proud of this because I didn’t apply myself.  My dad told me I didn’t apply myself but he didn’t mind pouring the chores and farm work to me either.  He still says I didn’t apply myself but I asked him, “exactly when was I supposed to apply myself with all the farm work going on.”  My dad had some college and my mom eventually received her GED so education was not a high priority.  

o   Lisa had a slumber party at our house and invited Beverly and several other of my former girlfriends and dad/mom put on an event for all of them.  I drove the tractor with a wagon attached to the top of the hill on the farm where we had a cookout and roasted marshmallows. My dad had me drive another piece of equipment back to the farm so I was no longer connected with the girlfriends which made me mad as hell.  But I did as I was told.

o   I was plowing a garden spot behind the house when Tommy Tucker and his family showed up.  That was fine but they had a daughter, Lori, who was about my age and she “distracted” me so my rows were a bit crooked as I was rubber necking to look at her.  I don’t think her family was too keen on my leering so they finally told her to go into the house.  That worked. Straight rows from then on!

o   I played Little League baseball and the coach of the team was John Zietz.  He had two sons on the team, plus me, plus Pat Bevill from the local area on the “Yankees.” The Damn Yankees.  I still can’t believe I was a damn Yankee at one time in my life but I was.  I went to the hardware store to get a glove for playing and decided I wanted a first baseman’s glove which was a glove without individual fingers.  Problem was I played third base or shortstop with it.  Can’t believe that was allowed but it was.  One day we were driving to a game in Mr. Zeitz’s car and one of his sons stuck a bat out the window and were trying to hit mail boxes.  Mr. Zietz stopped the car and yelled at the boys.  He said they had no idea how fast a car was going and what would happen if they actually struck a mail box like maybe breaking their arm or the bat or both.  But for sure they would have to fix the mail box.  He was angry!  I remember that car got very quiet.

o   The Zeitz’s were great friends of ours and we had a lot of fun playing baseball and basketball at their house, watching games on TV, and generally doing what kids do.  There was a field right beside their house that we used as a baseball field and Sandy Hill Road was a paved road at the end of the field.  We said that any ball that hit the road was a home run although no one hit it that far except Mr. Zietz.  He came out once before work and hit a few over the road and into the field on the other side.  Mr. Zeitz’s brother owned a farm beside the Zeitz’s house and it had a barn with a loft and the loft had a basketball goal in it.  This became our all-weather basketball court; didn’t matter if the wind was blowing, if it was cold, snowy, or raining, we could play basketball no matter the weather.

o   Me and my little sister Lou-Ann were in the woods beside a field and she was just learning to read and had a book with pictures in it.  I would ask her what the picture was, she would tell me, and the letters were below it so she could learn the spelling.  Bat, ball, horse, cow, etc.  Then we came upon a picture of an apple.  I asked her what that was and she kind of giggled and said, “That is a bottom.”  Of a person she meant.  I told her no, that was an apple.  She looked again and said, “No.  That is a bottom.”  We picked up everything and headed back to the house right then.  End of lesson; I thought that girl was hopeless.

o   When we moved to the Farm, my life changed.  I became a farm kid and everything else was secondary.  Everything. I worked on that farm hard until I joined the Air Force and everything I am is because of that farm.  When I joined the Air Force, I could outwork almost everyone because I learned to work on the farm.  I could find ways to do most anything because my dad taught me to think in terms of “how we can” instead of “why we can’t” do something.  I will be forever grateful to my dad for this.  I don’t know how he and mom went from scandalous re-marriage to owning and running this big farm within 6 years but they did. 

o   Our oldest barn had stalls for cows and a feed area where we kept grain for sick cows, milk cows, and new mother cows who needed a little help.  Above this was a hay loft which we filled with hay each summer.  We had a hay elevator which was powered by a tractor power take off.  Before we started using the elevator, my dad, who didn’t say much in those days (he does now), gave us all a safety briefing but really it was an admonition about staying away from the elevator lest we get hurt.  He told us, “if you reach up and get hay off that elevator, I’m going to whip you.”  So we let it the floor.  We weren’t worried about the danger; we were worried about getting a spanking.  He unloaded bales from the wagon onto the elevator and us kids plus mom and others were at the top getting them off the elevator and then stacking them.  We needed several people because one bale of hay might go 20 feet into the air at the peak of the roof so we’d build in stacks from the ground up, walk on those to stack higher.  Those bales would come off the elevator and we’d let them hit the floor before working them.  Safety first was not our real motto.  “No discipline from dad” was our main thought and to dad’s credit, no one ever got hurt up there.   I don’t know how many bales we put up there but several wagon-loads over several days.  It was a big barn so probably held a lot. The newest barn held our tobacco crop so we had to leave plenty of room for that when stacking hay. 

o   Each year we’d feed hay to the cows in the lower side of the barn so they could be out of the weather.  Problem was they would fill the side with cow manure and hay they stepped on and didn’t eat.  It would be 2 feet higher at the end of the winter.  We would bring our manure spreader in and pitchfork hay and cow manure into it many times. Then we’d take the manure spreader all over the farm and use the manure and hay as fertilizer.  One problem was that the side of the barn would bear the weight of the manure and hay as the floor filled, the wooden boards on that side of the barn would pop off and after getting the elevation corrected, we’d have to reattach the boards.  Wasn’t hard work but just something that had to be done each year.  One year my dad was knocking the nails back so they could be reused for the barn wood.  The boards would be all over the place and we while we were doing this duty, he saw a board a few feet away and stepped on it so he could drive the nail back.  Only there was a rock under it which made a perfect fulcrum.  When he stepped on the board, the other end flung into the air.  It came toward my face, filled my nose with manure and mud, but just grazed my nose.  My dad looked at me and said, “quit farting around and help me.”  He knew exactly what happened but gave no quarter.  I cleaned my nose out by blowing and got back to work. 

o   Near to the lower side of the barn was a kidney shaped pond that the cows drank out of.  It was about 3 feet deep and maybe 30 feet long.  We decided one day to go fishing in that pond using cane poles and worms.  Didn’t know if we’d catch anything; just a bunch of kids being kids.  But we did catch catfish and lots of them.  We learned if you left the cane poles that larger fish would eat the smaller ones caught and get hooked themselves. We did fry a mess of fish but they were hard to clean because of bones and because of sharp fins that they used to protect themselves.  But we fished and fished in that pond throughout our time on the farm.  One time I was fishing with Peggy and my bobber started pulling down so I ran over to my pole at the time when Peggy was pulling her pole up and she tripped me. I called her a very bad name and I got in huge trouble for doing that.

o   We drilled new hay seed of Clover; Orchard grass and Timothy and my dad fertilized the fields.  In Kentucky it rains all the time so we’d get three full cuttings a year and maybe a fourth if things went well.  Plus, we’d let the cow’s graze in some fields and with 330 acres with about 175 acres tillable, we had 100 or so mother cows.  Back in those days there were no round bales so everything we did was with square bales.  We had a mowing machine which was simply a long arm that would stick out one side of the tractor with triangle teeth on a cutting bar that would cut the hay. Then we had a rake that would rake the hay into rows after it sat for 3 days to cure. Then we had a square baler to make bales and bind them together with grass string.  When we ran out of space for putting hay in the barns, we’d stack it outside and cover it with plastic with old vehicle tires holding the plastic down.  The outside storage worked terribly but it was better than having no hay.  In Kentucky, the growing season stops about October and doesn’t resume until April so you have to have hay for cattle to make it through the winter.

o   One day we were hauling hay and had a wagon attached to a Harry Ferguson gasoline fueled tractor.  This tractor was about 25 HP, had a wide front end, and was made before Massey-Ferguson tractors.  I was about 12 and I was supposed to fill the tractor up with gas before we starting hauling hay and I did.  Only I forgot to put the gas cap on after filling it up.  It caught fire out in the field.  My dad turned the ignition off, then took off his shirt, and put the fire out with it.  It’s amazing the tractor didn’t explode and hurt or kill someone but it didn’t.  I can still remember him opening the hood (it had a front swing so opened from the steering wheel) and seeing the fire.  I was driving the tractor at the time and he yelled for me to get off.  After he put the fire out his eye was blinking (which he did when angry or tickled and I knew he wasn’t tickled) but he calmly sat me down in the field and explained why it was so important to make sure everything was done correctly so this type thing didn’t happen in the future.  It never did.

o   In the winter, the ponds would freeze up and we’d have to take an axe out and chop a square hole so the cows could get a drink.  We’d do that and the cows would gather around to get a drink.  There was no order do it so the biggest or meanest cow would go first and man could each cow drink a lot.  We’d chop the ice and the next day we’d chop the same hole again and there would be two inches more of ice formed. 

o   Winter would freeze the water in the small pond beside the lower barn and we’d “skate” on that pond although we didn’t have skates really.  We’d just slide around and have a great time.  One time when coming back from the pond to the house, we came across a calf that had just been born I made Lisa carry the calf to the barn while I kept the mother cow from killing her.  I wanted to get the calf into the barn in some hay so it didn’t freeze to death.  It lived.

o        Dad wanted to get a herd of cows with black bodies and white faces and no horns.  He had a lot of trouble with pink eye in Hereford cattle but had good luck with black and white cows.  So, he got a $30,000 registered Angus Bull.  Now a good cow at this time was like $100, and we paid $18,000 for 330 acres of land so $30,000 was an amazing amount of money.  Pop didn’t buy the bull, he borrowed it.  I thought a $30,000 bull would be a gigantic specimen but this one was little but muscular.  Dad said that is what he wanted and he said a smaller bull that threw small calves that grew fast is what he wanted.  And that is what he got.  That bull was on our farm for one mating season then dad’s black with white face operation was off and going.

o   One afternoon my dad had a relative come to the farm and he was showing them the operation when it came time to milk.  I stuck my head into the feed room and left the lower part of my body in the cattle run area in the middle of the barn.  I called for my dad and ask him which feed I should give to the milk cow.  I did not have to do this because I had been feeding the cow the same feed for months but since he had a visitor, I was showing off.  While I was calling for him, the milk cow got impatient and put her horns between my legs and lifted me off the ground.  Made my hiney bone hurt BAD.  She wanted her feed and I was holding up the operation, I guess.  I got her the same feed I had been giving her, fed her and then milked her like I had every day.  Served me right, I guess. 

o   We had a cow that was having trouble birthing her calf so we called the local veterinarian in the Brandenburg area.  He had a thick German accent and was kind of hard to understand.  He hooked up a puller to the barn post, hooked the other end to the calf’s leg and pulled her out of the cow.  That calf hit the ground and he said, “dead as a mackerel.”  I understood that be advised. He doctored up the cow so she wouldn’t get infected and me and dad burned the calf. 

o   We had a calf born and her mom died during the birth and we called this calf, “Calfy.”  I know. Original.  We had to mix up baby calf formula and feed this calf in a 2-gallon galvanized bucket with a huge nipple on the end.  Everything worked great because when Calfy heard us mixing up the feed, she would come running to the fence.  We would hold the bucket on one side of the fence and put the nipple through the fence and off she would go.  I’m not sure about humans, but calves butt their mom’s milk bags and they are born knowing to do this.  I think it releases more milk to them but I know for sure it is instinctive.  We’d be holding this bucket and she would rear back and head butt the bucket like she would normally do to her mom’s milk bag.  Only our bucket was open ended so we had to watch and when she butted, we’d quickly move the bucket back so as not to spill.  Every once in a while, we’d get distracted while feeding her and the milk would splash all over us.  I hated that. My sister Lou-Ann would lead her through the field with her hand in the calf’s mouth.  Calfy thought she was going to be fed.  She grew up to become a good cow but was more of a pet and my dad said, she became more of a pest than anything and when she got big, she did not understand that and could hurt us without trying to.  We eventually slaughtered her so we would have beef in the freezer to eat.  Now THAT is the circle of life.

o   When we purchased the farm, it had sagebrush and sassafras trees encroaching on the fields and taking up open land.  We burned the sagebrush and my dad planted clover, orchard grass, and timothy and he followed up with fertilizer for hay and grazing. That combination took off and grew thick hay and grazing fields.  The problem was sassafras trees which were small trees about 10 feet tall and they would take fields over when the fields were not managed.  We bush hogged the small trees, pulled others out with chains, then plowed and disked the area up to clear the brushy areas and make the fields open again.  Once managed, the sassafras never returned.  One problem was that if you broke a tree off leaving the roots in the ground, it left a Staub above the ground that was sharp and hard on tractor tires. One day I was doing this job and ran over a Staub putting a giant hole in the back tractor tire.  Dad got angry as heck that I did this even though I was trying to do the right thing.  He told me that a new tire would cost him $80 (back in the day) and I felt horrible.  From then on, I was very cognizant of tractor tires and making sure I didn’t do anything to harm them.  I never had another incident with tires the rest of the time I was on the farm.

o   The fences around the farm and between the fields were in bad shape and we spent months fixing them.  We put in some new fencing with new cedar fence posts but there was sandstone rock about 2 feet down which we had to break with a breaker bar to get down further and we used concrete to help stabilize the shallow fence posts.  Where possible, we used existing posts and fixed fence instead but this was an on-going issue.  In Kentucky with the rain and intense growth, we constantly had to clear brush from the fences to keep them up.  There is no telling how many times we had to get cows out of our fields they shouldn’t be in or worse, out of neighbor fields or the road to our house.

o    My dad liked to have a few hogs around mostly for butchering but a few for selling and just a few sows would have several piglets so it didn’t take many.  Problem was the hogs were nasty and destructive.  They would make big holes in the ground and water would gather so they would at least be cool and the mother sows would lay in them.  We also had to use net wire for fencing to keep hogs in their area.  The most productive thing was to put rings in their noses which would keep hogs from rooting as much and they wouldn’t tear the fences up.  When piglets were born, we would snap their eye teeth so they didn’t grow fangs and we’d put rings in their nose with an instrument that looked medieval as I think about it now.  We’d put a nose ring into this contraption and the ring was open with two sharp edges on each side.  Then we’d put it up to the piglet’s nose and clamp shut running the sharp edges together causing a little bleeding and eliciting a loud squeal from the piglet.  We’d put a little medicine on their nose and put them back with the sow.    

o   Tobacco was the cash crop for farmers when I grew up and it was the life blood of the farm.  In the winter right before Christmas, tobacco cash was very much needed.  Tobacco was a labor-intensive crop and we had about an acre of it although we were limited in the number of pounds we could sell.  The labor-intensive part was not a problem since we had 7 kids and 2 adults in the family so we had labor available. The process included burning (or chemical burning) a plant bed to eliminate any weeds growing. Then we’d mix tobacco seeds with fertilizer and the tobacco seed packages for 1 acre of tobacco was only a small package about the size of a cornbread package.  We’d prepare a plant bed by putting small cedar logs (from small cedar trees we’d gather), till the area, put the logs in, spread the fertilizer and tobacco seed lightly covering the seeds then covering the entire bed with canvas and stretching it by putting nails in the logs and attaching the canvas eye hooks to them.  The tobacco seeds would grow into thousands of plants and when the plants starting pushing on the canvas, we’d remove the canvas, braid it, and store it for the next year.  Then we’d prepare the tobacco field by plowing and disking it followed by getting the tobacco planter hooked up to the tractor.  The planter was a contraption that included a water barrel on the front of the tractor used to water each plant as it was put into the ground.  Two people would ride in the planter, put their plants into a bin, put the individual plants into a Ferris wheel where they would be taken into the ground with a splash of water and then covered by two wheels that would press the ground together after planting. But to get ready for planting, we had to pull plants and store them in bundles wrapped in grass sacks and kept moist.  Once we had enough, we’d plant.  After planting, we would go out with a small “re- planter” you could carry but it had water in it and everywhere there was a missing plant, we’d re-plant.  When everything was planted, there was weeding, special fertilizing, spraying for suckers (growths where the stalk and the leaves met), and topping.  Topping was removing the seed flowers from the top of each plant before spraying and finally, harvesting.  Then we put tobacco sticks out which were 1x1 inch hickory or oak stick about 5 feet high. Tobacco sticks were put out every other row, every third plant. They were driven into the ground with tobacco stick mallets which had about 4-inch heads on them.  Once all that was done, the tobacco was cut down stalk by stalk with each stalk being put on a stick with the use of a tobacco spear which was simply a metal piece with a sharp tip billowing out to cover the tobacco stick.  So, we’d chop each plant with a tommyhawk, then spear them onto the sticks, 6 stalks to a stick, then move the spear to the next stick.  Three days after chopping the tobacco, we’d stack the sticks onto a wagon and move them to the barn where three people would get into the barn in tiers and stack the tobacco on tier poles so it could cure.  After a couple of months, it was ready to strip.  We’d wait for rain so the moisture content would be high, then we’d take the tobacco down, remove it from the sticks and put it into bulk stacks. Then we’d take it out of bulk to the stripping room and strip it into four grades according to leaf type: trash, leaf, lugs, and tips.  We’d strip it into “hands” and then tie the hands with a tobacco leaf and put them on a tobacco stick and when the stick would get full, we’d put that into a bulk for transport to the tobacco warehouse.  Then we’d sell it.  Lots of work but at about $1 a pound, it was worth it.  Kept us housed, fed, clothed, and warm. 

o   We had a German Shepherd mix dog that had been dropped off and came to our farm; this is how we got most of our dogs.  If they chased cows, dad would pronounce the death sentence and the dogs would be no more.  This was a German Shepard like most of the other ones we had and he had a history.  He had been mistreated by black people at some point in his life because we had some black folks who like to come and fish in our ponds and my dad would always let anyone fish who came and asked.  Four black men came to the house to ask if they could fish and I heard the dog just raising cane so I went outside and three of the four were in the car with the windows rolled up.  One was at the top of the gate post looking down at the dog barking angrily at him.  Apparently, they were headed to the front door to knock but the dog chased them off.  My dad let them fish but we tied the dog up first to make sure he wasn’t a problem for them.  They were about to leave but dad asked them to stay and told them he’d put the dog up.  This was a scary dog to others but when he started barking or growling, our sister Lou-Ann would put her hand in his mouth and lead him away.  So scary to see but not scary to our family.  He knew us.  I remember when we first found him, we gave him cattle feed which is grain and we mixed it with water.  He gobbled it down and growled the entire time. He was just starving because soon after that, we fed him scraps from the table and he was fine.

o   As kids, we decided it would be a good idea in the winter to put on a play for mom and dad.  We did and it was probably terrible but ended with us telling them how good they were to us.  My dad thought we were trying to get something from him so he didn’t appreciate it much.  We weren’t trying to get anything; we were just being kids.  The stage for that play was a closet and that reminded me about clothing.  We were poor so mostly had hand-me-downs from cousins and others and I remember I had a yellow shirt in the mix that I really liked but it had huge holes in the underarm area so I found some black thread and sewed it together but I didn’t sew it too tight so I had black thread on a yellow shirt sewed poorly.  I imagine I was a sight to see.

o   We had a big pond below the barns and it was used for watering cattle and hogs as well.  When it froze, this is the pond we’d chop ice on so the cows could drink so it was the center of the farm universe.  It also had a lot of turtles in it and they would get on logs or just stick their heads out of the water. It had a lot of life in and around it.  My step-sister Peggy and my sister Lisa were walking around this pond with Mom.  Lisa was on one side and they were on the other.  For some reason they were searching for duck eggs and Lisa found some.  She started yelling "DUCK AAGGGSSS!" at the top of her lungs when she found them.  She sounded so country!  Mom and Peggy laughed and laughed and they told this story to the entire family at the supper table which we all thought was hilarious.  Well, everyone except Lisa.   In a similar story, Peggy brought a baby duck to the farm and she named him “Herman.”  Lisa and Peggy decided to put him on the big pond and off he went paddling away.  Lisa and Peggy were so proud.  About 1/3 of the way across he disappeared; he was pulled under by, as Lisa called it, “one of the evil turtles.”  Lisa and Peggy orchestrated a funeral for poor Herman.   

o   During this time, we started attending Ekron Baptist Church and we went there because Aunt Vera turned us onto it.  I remember that we were accepted at that church from the first day so I liked it.  Plus, there were lots of cute girls there which made me happy.  There were lots of families with lots of kids going there which was a lot of fun for us.

o   My dad had a Rambler station wagon that he bought when he and mom first married and it was a good rig for our big family.  There was no such thing as a mini-van back then so a station wagon was “the thing to have” and everyone with a big family had one.  One time Lou-Ann got sick so mom and dad took her to Louisville in a rush.  He was speeding so got pulled over by a policeman and then got escorted to the hospital.  Lou-Ann was ok, thank goodness, but dad ruined his Rambler as I believe he ran it out of oil.  We eventually used it as a storage unit on the farm keeping fencing materials and other things dry and safe in it.

o   After the Rambler, dad purchased a 1955 black chevy station wagon with only two front doors.  This was not a 4-door model so getting all of kids in was, I’m sure, not very elegant.  This vehicle is now probably a collector’s item but back then, it was just a utility vehicle and not very utilitarian for our family!  It looked like a hearse and we heard that from everyone so dad got rid of it. 

o   One time we went to the Smith’s, the neighboring farm, because they were supposed to be killing a hog and we went to help.  Unfortunately, they guys doing the killing were liquored up and couldn’t shoot straight so they just kept wounding the poor hog.  My dad eventually took the .22 rifle took his time aiming, and with one shot, killed the hog.  I remember it froze and fell over when he shot.  Then they put the hog in boiling water to remove the bristles, and then began the slaughtering process.

o   To catch the school bus, we had to walk to the top of the hill and catch the bus on Sandy Hill Road.  From the bus to our house was about half a mile but we’d walk each day dutifully.  Today that would probably be characterized as child abuse but back then we didn’t mind.  We’d meet the Smith kids at their farm and all walk up to the stop together.  Rick Smith was the oldest of the Smith boys (all boys) and he took a shine to Lisa.  She didn’t shine back so Rick’s advances went nowhere. Of course, they were only in the 6^th grade.  Lisa had to run home every day anyway to watch Dark Shadows on Channel 41 the first UHF and independent station in Louisville which we called the “snow channel.”  We couldn’t get the signal very well so I had to move the antenna around so Lisa could get a fairly good picture.  A good picture was the snow channel anyway but it was as good as we could get.  Lisa liked that kind of show and still does; she has watched a lot of the zombie movies so she has had a life of it.  I had work to do and I hate that kind of show anyway so they were of no interest to me.

o   Mom took us kids to the top of the hill on the farm to pick blackberries. Her dad had made a cart that was on a 3-point hitch to a tractor and she took us up there in that cart.  I had to get out several times to move small trees out of the way so she could get the tractor by. The road going up was steep, rutted and horrible; a tractor could barely get through. But we made it and all got to picking.  The blackberries were wild and the briars were very thick.  I was very worried about copperhead snakes but made a lot of noise hoping this would cause any snakes to vamoose before we encountered each other.  The top of the hill was scary for me. There was a fairly clear field probably 10 acres but overgrown with sassafras trees and there was a well up there which didn’t have a top on it so just kind of open.  The farm, and this field, was owned by a person who was bailing hay up there and he had a problem with the bailer so he got off the tactor to try and fix it.  Something went wrong and he got himself into the bailer and was killed.  Two things came from that:  1.  I was told never to get close to a bailer while it was running because you could be killed and 2.  I believed that field was haunted so I wanted to get out of there before dark.  Anyway, off to one side of the field were the blackberries.  I’m not sure how many we picked but several gallons and we put them in the cart and the kids all walked down after we were finished.  Mom picked the most and we had a dog that followed her everywhere.  I found out years later that she wanted the dog around in case there were copperheads and she kept him around by giving him treats which she had stored in her pockets.  Mom canned those blackberries and we had blackberry jam all winter!

o   My sister Rebekah’s name was previously spelled Rebecca but she wanted it changed to the Bible spelling so Mom said she got it done through the Kentucky capital at Frankfort.  Not much was ever said about that and I only know it happened.

o   Grandpa and Grandma Embrey came down with the flu and asked mom and dad if Lisa could come stay with them to help cook and clean.  Grandpa used to call her “Lifa” to tease her and we did this for years after he died; I still do it from time to time.  Anyway, mom and dad let her stay and help them which Lisa loved.  She had a great time, was alone so no sisters running around behind her causing trouble, asking for things, and just being mean to her.  She listened to records on Grandpa’s console and was generally enjoying herself.  When Grandma felt better, Lisa talked with her a lot and they became pretty close.  Lisa asked her if she was happy every time she found out she was going to have a baby. She laughed and said, "Oh no! I cried and cried and cried." 

o   Lisa was the odd duck on the girl side of the family.  She was the oldest so asked to do most of the work as mom preferred to work in the fields alongside dad which is actually understandable. Lisa, therefore, did most of the cooking, cleaning, and taking care of her sisters.  This was a his, mine, and ours family but us boys were out working on the farm all the time so we were good.  Lisa was the only girl from his previous marriage while mom and dad had Lou-Ann and Rebekah and mom had Peggy and Sheila and those two only came to our house part time. Lou-Ann and Rebekah would ride Lisa unmercifully asking for things, demanding things, and being toots.  Poor Lisa would work her butt off but she didn’t get much quarter.  I remember I took up for her once telling mom, “If that were Lou-Ann or Rebekah you wouldn’t do that.”  Mom never said anything to me but Lisa said she took it to heart and talked to her about it. 

o   Rebekah had a wandering eye as a child so she went it to have surgery on it.  I went with mom when she got out of the hospital and she had a patch over the eye and I remember her being very mean to us and crying either because of the surgery, the patch, or the anesthesia.    Don’t know what the deal was but she was angry and mean to all of us; she was not a good patient.  But her eye was straight from then on.  Rebekah looks like mom; before she married Johnny she had a round face and when she had a child, she was bigger.  But then she started running and now she leads cross-fit training; today she is Rebekah hard body.

o   I used to keep statistics on all University of Kentucky basketball games when I was young; this was just for me and my dad, it was not official at all so I don’t want you to get the wrong idea.  I never went to a UK but I was just like other Kentuckians at that age and I loved Big Blue.  I didn’t watch them on TV much until the NCAA tournament but I listened to them on the radio and the radio voice was Kaywood Ledford.  The coach was Adolph Rupp and I remember he was being interviewed by Kaywood who wanted to know about the idea of just playing and not keeping score.  Adolph told him that was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard of and he said that in his best southern drawl.  Adolph was angry at his team’s effort so he said he was going to put Jim Dinwitte, a guard, in as center because at least he would fight.  Of course, he didn’t but he got his team’s attention.  I followed Kentucky until I got older and learned that they wouldn’t recruit black players and one was Butch Beard, a local basketball legend who wanted to play for UK but couldn’t play at UK because the other SEC schools would not allow it. So Butch and Wes Unseld went to the University of Louisville instead.  I became a U of L Cardinal fan after I grew older and learned more about Rupp and the SEC ways.  But at this time in my life, I was a UK fan and I used to call my dad at work with the statistics, the intelligence, and the down low.  I was definitely sports minded. 

Irvington

o   Between my 8^th grade and freshman year, we moved from the farm to Irvington.  Aunt Gerry, Barbara, Duncan, and Rusty moved to the farm in the house we previously lived in.   They moved to the farm into that house because they sold their house in Louisville and wanted to move into that house and my dad wanted to build a house.    We purchased a parsonage and a church in Irvington that belonged to the Presbyterian Church.  They had two presbyterian churches in Irvington and decided to consolidate into one.  The consolidated congregation put this one up for sale although they didn’t advertise.  I guess they thought the Lord would provide someone to purchase it.  He did, us.  My dad went to the Irvington bank and told them he was looking for a house. They told him about this one and they wanted $5,000 for it and my dad made the deal on the spot. 

o   There was only one bathroom in the house and it was on the 2^nd floor with two bedrooms.  One bedroom was for mom and dad and one for the three girls.  Me and Phillip slept in the living room until dad split the dining room into a bedroom for me and Phillip and a smaller dining room for the entire family.  There was only room for bunk beds in that room but it was fine for us. 

o   Our bedroom on the 1^st floor was right below the bathroom and one day the upstairs bathroom flooded and leaked down on me and Phillip.  We yelled up, “hey, stop that!”  We did not know what was going on but from that day forward, everyone who used the upstairs bathroom knew that our room was below it and they were careful and cognizant of the potential problems should they flood the bathroom or backup the toilet.

o   This was the first time I could remember living in a town around people and it was a trip.  It only lasted 1 year but what a year that was:  town living, working on the farm, going to a new school, and new girls!  I escaped from the house at night through a window on the first floor and ran around with the other hoodlums in Irvington after everyone else was in bed.  That was fun for me and I never really did anything bad but running around at night was not very smart.  I was usually meeting Joe Board who was a year older than me and when you are a kid, one year is a lot.  Joe Board was a good guy to me, he was a basketball guru, his dad was a bachelor and he lived in a trailer with his son.   My dad came home from work one night and caught me and Joe Board walking around.  He talked to Joe alone in the car and Joe came back to me and said crying, “Your dad is awesome.  Don’t ever let him down.”   I never thought of my dad like that and I never saw Joe Board, who I thought was Mr. Cool, like that.  Was a significant event for me.

o   We lived in Irvington but the state of Kentucky had developed a consolidation plan for local schools by paying for consolidated county schools where all students in the county would go to one high school after grade and junior high in other towns.  This eliminated a lot of small schools and let to many more opportunities at larger county schools.  We went to Breckenridge County High School and Irvington was 15 miles away so we had to catch a bus each morning to get to the high school.  That was cool for me because I wasn’t a new kid; I was a kid coming from somewhere else like everyone else. 

o   There are lots of things I remember about Breckenridge County High School: 1. There were a group of black girls singing “We Shall Overcome” almost every morning in the hallway. I knew that there was racial strife in the nation and I knew that there was racial separation in Breckenridge County.  We had a tobacco patch near where all the black people lived in Hardinsburg when we lived at Freedom.  And I mean all the black people lived there.  It had a bad name that I will not write but the people were good to us, helped us, and watched over our crop.  2. When I was in the 2^nd grade, Hardinsburg High School won the state basketball tournament before there was a Breckenridge County High School.  Butch Beard played for Hardinsburg and he was Mr. Basketball in Kentucky and wanted to play for the University of Kentucky but they would not take any black players at that time.  He and Wes Unseld, the previous year’s Mr. Basketball for Kentucky (who played for Seneca High in Louisville) played for the University of Louisville.  Both Butch Beard and Wes Unseld played in the NBA and both won NBA titles.  Hardinsburg High School played in a gymnasium with three rows of seats on the bottom, and three rows of seats in the balcony with the backboard attached to the balcony.  When I was in the 4^th grade, the Breckenridge County team came to play an intersquad game in the gym and it was so loud my ears rang for three days afterward.  I became an instant basketball fan because of that game.

o    First time I’d ever heard of Vocational Education was in Breckenridge County.  They would take kids who would have otherwise just matriculated through high school with no skills and teach them a usable skill and make them immediately employable upon graduation.  They offered: carpentry, electrical, auto mechanics, tool and die for the guys and office technician training for the girls.  This was the early 70’s and it was totally sexist but considered normal then. 

o    Mr. Mosser was the freshman English teacher in Breckenridge County and he had an unusual style of teaching.  He had his students reenact literature scenes and I remember doing one from Shakespeare.  There was some singing involved; the girls sang one part and the boys another.  The girls did great but us boys did horrible; there were no good boy singers in that class.  Every morning a girl from the front office would come in and get the attendance report.  He stood up every time she came in and we asked him why.  He said, “I was taught that men should rise whenever a woman enters the room.”  All us boys got together and decided to do the same without telling Mr. Mosser.  When she came in, up we came and that poor girl shrieked and was about to run out of the room.  Mr. Mosser was also surprised but he gave the girl the report and she quickly left.  After she left, he asked us what in the world we were doing so we told him we were standing when a woman entered the room like he did.  He looked at us and said, “well, you certainly surprised me.  But you all learned something!”  We did and so did he.  We were listening and learning.

o    I was taking Social Studies at Breckenridge County and it was easy for me.  The teacher drove a VW Carmen Ghia and was routinely talking about it going 60 MPH top end and he was fun to listen to and learn from.  I was not trying very hard in Social Studies and was told by a teacher I was a huge disappointment but I was doing the same thing I had always done; study a little during study hall, take no books home because I had to work when I got home, so I was surprised by this.  He told me I was not trying and gave me a “C” grade.  C meant continue to me so I was good. But I was very disappointed that he was not happy with my effort.

o    For some reason, I took freshman Spanish and our teacher was a recent graduate from the University of Louisville.  She would say things in Spanish and make us repeat them.  Over and over until we got it.  This really seemed to work and lots of the Spanish fraises and words she used and taught us, I still remember.  Anyway, it was the early 70’s so short dresses were the norm; teachers never wore pants suits or slacks or anything like that.  She would write on the board and when she raised her arm to write with a one-piece dress on, her undies would show.  Back then women wore hose so undies were covered up by those but she would put on quite a show for freshman boys.  None of the students, even the girls, said anything to her and I’m not sure if she ever found out.  During that year we had a Language Arts Fair at Meade County and we made a classroom into a soccer field and we would cheer, “Adalente, Luche, Gane” (Go, Fight, Win) for the judges.  We did not gane because our display was kind of weak.

o    We had a freshman Science teacher and her first name was Millicent.  I don’t remember her last name but she was a great teacher although exasperated with us.  The boys would call her by her first name which she allowed and it just got worse from there for her.  

o    After our calf sold, we had money for school clothes so I went and bought some in Louisville.  Usually, I bought jeans and boring shirts but since I was a freshman, I decided I needed some flashier clothes so bought some outrageous outfits which were easily available in the 70’s and wore them to school.  I had one outfit that was pants with stripes going down and I matched it with a tie-die shirt.  Looked awful.  Looked outrageous for sure which I guess that’s what I was going for. I wore that outfit to school one day and went into the boy’s bathroom where I encountered an upper classman.  I thought we were going to throw down but he looked at me and said, “Did you take those clothes from a dead clown?”  I told him I bought them.  He said, “They saw you coming didn’t they.”  I wasn’t sure what he meant then but I sure do now.  I remember I also bought a tight-fitting shirt that looked like it wouldn’t fit a doll but it stretched out to fit me.  Of course, I was oblivious to how it actually looked and am sure I was talked about for looking like a dork. 

o    In math class as a freshman and the teacher was not all that great.  She was the one who taught me fractions and I got a good grade but I don’t think I was well taught.  The thing I remember is her saying I had beautiful eyes and eyelashes and if I grew my hair long, I would make a pretty girl.  She said this in class and it was soon all over the school.  I was just a little kid about 4’10” and 100 pounds and I was teased unmercifully. 

o    The school started having breakfasts every morning and they were free breakfasts for low-income people but I didn’t qualify so mine cost a nickel!  I remember we were getting gasoline one day in Harned and back then the attendants used to pump gas for people so my mom was talking to the attendant and he was so happy about the free breakfasts for his daughter.  I remember him saying, “She can eat as much as she wants.”   Kentucky got that right be advised and I ate breakfasts every day.  I don’t remember doing that when I got to Meade County but in Breckenridge County, they sure had them and made it convenient to eat!

o    I attended Breckenridge County football and basketball games whenever possible. They had activity buses that ran from Irvington to the school for the games so we rode to and from for free.  After basketball games, there would be sock hop dances on the basketball floor and they were pretty fun.  I had a girl friend who was in the 8^th grade at Irvington and I took her several times.  We made out in the basketball stands on the buses and the other boys made fun of us but I didn’t care that I was going way to far with her in such a public setting.   I was totally in lust and that was more important than anything others were saying.

o  I got involved in some activities in Breckenridge County not because I was interested in the work but rather, I was interested in the girls who were interested in the activities.  So, I didn’t really care about the activities, I had care for other things.  I remember my mom picked me and a girl up one time at school to take us home, she was an upper classman, beautiful and way out of my league but I was putting on a good show for her and mom going home.  I raised my arms and must have smelled horrible because mom made a horrible face.  After we dropped the girl off, mom and I had a discussion about personal hygiene that I never forgot.

o  During this time, Lisa had Rebekah were attached at the hip.  Wherever Lisa was, Rebekah was there as well.  Lisa tried to get rid of her to visit friends but could not.  If she wanted to go, Mom made Lisa take her.  They ultimately became best friends but during this time, Lisa was an 8^th grader and Rebekah was in the 1st grade so to Rebekah, Lisa was a giant and knew a lot of people and things.

o    We had a little dog at Irvington named Tiger and it really belonged to Lisa.  One night dad was trying to sleep after shift work and for some reason, Tiger was circling the house barking.  He would stop and start barking that was interrupting dad’s sleep so dad got up and checked on the situation, found nothing amiss, and ultimately football kicked the dog across the porch and broke his hip.   Lisa found the dog whining so, out of remorse, Mom made Dad let her take her take Tiger to the vet.  The vet kept him for a little while and when they gave him back to us they put his leg in a splint and brace so that dog would run around still but didn’t step on the leg.  Pop certainly regretted kicking the dog because it ultimately cost him a lot of money, which he hated.   

o    Lisa got her first (and probably only) “D” in 8^th Grade Science.  The teacher let the class run wild but then graded them like she taught an orderly class.  Lisa performed as a “bad girl” for the first time in her life and she loved it.  She also tried to change her name from Lisa to Leah because she thought that was cooler and it was a different name.  Unfortunately, she kept forgetting to respond when she was called that so “Leah” never became a thing.

o    As I wrote earlier, Grandpa Powers stayed with us in Irvington before he died and he died while we were in Irvington.  He stayed in my parents’ bedroom, then moved to the girls’ room, and whomever was displaced had to sleep on a hide-a-bed in the living room.  I was in charge of staying with him and I guess I didn’t mind because I did it, listened to all his stories about basketball, WWI, college, baseball, and the old days.  After a while, I could tell them for him and he’d say, did I ever tell you the story about ……... whatever and I’d say “yes” and repeat it to him.  He hated when I did that but now my dad tells stories and if I’d heard them before, I never say anything.  I do the same thing and I know the people I worked with had heard my stories multiple times so I come by it honestly.  In fact, I did this so much that before I told a story, I’d ask if they had heard it already. 

o    Grandpa Powers was given exercises to do by the physician and we tried to get him to do them but Grandpa would just lay there.  The physician said there was nothing wrong with him; that he was just not trying any longer, which was right.  When we gave Grandpa a bath, Lisa and Mom had to quickly clean up his room.  He chewed tobacco and would miss his spittoon so there was tobacco spit on the floor and wall that had to be disinfected.  Lisa would pour the spittoon out into the commode but one time, she forgot to take a rag out so she clogged up the pipes which rained commode water on me and Phillip in the room below the bathroom.  I was in bed and yelled, “Hey, stop that.”  I didn’t know what was going on.  Everyone laughed at me but it wasn’t funny.   Once the parents found out that it was Lisa’s fault, it was not funny for her be advised.

o    My parents gave him a room in the house in Irvington, and I was the primary caregiver.  He would tell me stories over and over as he couldn’t really get out of the room much.  I would listen to his stories and wait on him dutifully.  When he got in bad shape the physician said there was nothing wrong with him; he had just given up.  We used to massage his back to try and do what the physician told us but nothing worked because he wouldn’t help.  One day, he hadn’t shaved or bathed for days and my dad told me to make him do those things.  I told him my dad said for him to shave and bathe; he didn’t want to but he did.  I remember him standing up with his crutches to shave with a straight razor and I was in the bathroom monitoring because I was told to do so.  He mixed shaving cream up in a cup and used the shaving brush to put the cream on his face then shaved with the straight razor.  Yiikes!  Didn’t take a bath but cleaned up using a wash cloth and changed his clothing. 

o    When he stayed with us, he’d do three things that I remember very well. First, he liked bread and jelly so when he couldn’t walk very well, he’d ask us to bring him “jelly bread” and we’d dutifully do so.  Then he would regale us with stories; many of which we’d heard already. Second, he would lay in his bed and yell at the top of his lungs, “oh me I’m sick.” I would be the one asked to go check on him and I did.  I think he was lonelier than anything and I’d sit with him for hours.  He’d tell stories but also tell me “Oh me I’m sick” throughout the stories.  Finally, when no one responded in as timely a manner as he thought sufficient, he’d yell, “uh, Tim” or “uh Pat” for my mom or “uh Sonny” for my dad (he called my dad Sonny throughout his life) until someone responded; usually me.  He would yell all night long (especially when dad was home), Grandpa would yell, “Oh Lula, I’m so sick!  Oh Lula, I’m going to die.”  Lula was his spouse who had been gone over 10 years and it was dad’s mom which hurt my dad badly.  This was my grandpa’s plan, I think.  I remember going downstairs when dad was supposed to be sleeping after working but he was sitting up worrying about his dad. 

o    Lou-Ann had her tonsils removed while we were in Litchfield; Lou-Ann had lots of surgeries and hospitalizations so we were kind of used to it.  Until then she was so tiny; just a little bit of a thing.  After she got her tonsils out, she got fluffy and stayed that way the rest of her life.

o    I became aware of spirituality at Irvington and I was scared that something bad was going to happen to me.  I remember coming down the stairs saying prayers that nothing would happen to me and, of course, nothing did.  But later in life I was concerned that we were taught hell fire and brimstone teaching and I was convinced I was going to hell if I didn’t pray enough and believe enough.  That is not good for a kid I think although teaching them about God and love is good. 

o    My mom was at the local grocery store getting some goods for the family and cars parked in front of the store on the main street through town.  They were not parked headed in but parallel parked.  Anyway, she got back in the car when a black kid came up to the back of the car and was saying, “Timmy uh, Timmy uh……trying to remember my last name so mom got back out of the car and said “Powers” and gave him a big hug.  He was a classmate of mine from Meade County when I went to 7^th and 8^th grade there.  His name was Isiah Fuller and I remember he was called on the loud speaker in every room for some award he received but the principal mispronounced his name.  He called him “Isiah Fullerlite.”  He was so upset and the teacher, Mr. Humphries, tried to calm him down but Isiah told him, “What if they called you Mr. Humpback?”  Everyone including Mr. Humphries laughed at that.  He was a good kid and good to me.

o    Several friends of mine in Irvington decided to cross the main highway and go into the south hills above Irvington to go swimming in a pond they knew about and they invited me.  I didn’t know how to swim but the pond was only a few feet deep so off we went.  I had a great time but that pond was used by cows to get a drink and they would mess in it as well so when we got finished, our hair, when it dried was brown with dirt and stiff as a board.  I went home and took a bath and the bath water got brown as well.  I remember I had to get totally inspected by mom after the bath to make sure I was completely clean. 

o    There was a fish place in Irvington that we’d go to most Sundays after church.  We’d get fried fish sandwiches and other fried foods and while they were not good for us, they sure tasted good! We always got the food to go because the seating area was small and we’d eat it at home.  I remember that the sacs that they put the food in would have big grease spots on them by the time we got home.  Again, not good for you but certainly good to eat!

o    I had a bad tooth that was giving me toothaches so mom took me to a dentist.  We did not practice good dental hygiene then so teeth were a normal problem for us.  When we went to the dentist, he said he’d have to pull the tooth so off he went to do that.  He gave me Novocain and then went to work. The tooth might have needed to be pulled but it was a molar and the back of my mouth and he couldn’t get the tooth to come out because the roots were deep and not participating in this event.  He’d try to pull it a while then he’d come back and try again.  By then the Novocain had worn off and I was hollering every time he was trying.  I’m not sure he was that good of a dentist and I vaguely remember him putting one foot on my chair to get getter leverage.  I know he lifted me out of the chair several times but finally the tooth came out.  I bled like a stuck hog for several hours and I swelled up like a bullfrog for a few days but no more toothache! 

o    There was a retired farmer and former Kentucky state representative who lived across the street from us.  I used to mow their grass and we’d talk and talk about laws that he helped enact while in the legislature.  His wife was watching me work on the lawn mower one day and said I had the prettiest hands which I thought was horrible.   She said I should be a piano player.  I told her I wanted to be a farmer. 

o    On the only Halloween we spent in Irvington, I dressed up as a girl with high heels and all.  Talk about super weird but I went out trick or treating with all my siblings and did pretty well with regard to harvesting candy.  But at the end of the night, my feet were killing me and I asked mom how in the world women dealt with that.  She said, “Oh honey, you just get used to it after a while but they do hurt.”  Good grief.  My sister Lisa loved living in Irvington because to her it was the big city but it was really a town of less than 1000.  She went out trick or treating with us and a bunch of friends walking through the neighborhood and having fun. 

o    I heard that a guy had a house he wanted to get painted so I took my brother Phillip over to his house an offered to do the job.  He said we were too little to do the job and he was probably right. We didn’t know anything about painting and we probably would have done a bad job but I do remember having the courage to ask.

o    There was a grocery right down the road from where we lived and I used to go down there with a list from mom and green American dollars.  If people didn’t have money, they would put it on “payment” and pay when they got paid.  There were no credit cards back then…….at least not any that I knew about.

o    We lived on gravel roads on the farms so I had no need for a bicycle or learning to ride one.  In Irvington, the roads were paved and a bike helpful for getting around.  I learned to ride and I got a bike and I biked all over Irvington most times not going anywhere, just running around and riding around.

o    We had a garage in Irvington and we put the freezer in there and plugged it in.  Worked great except one time I needed to unplug the freezer for a minute to plug something else in.  Trouble was I forgot to plug the freezer back in after I used the plug-in for something else.  My dad went out to the freezer two days later and opened it up; everything was still cold but thawed.  I got in huge trouble and we had to cook everything and store as much as we could afterward.  I can promise you that I was more careful in the future. He had ½ a hog and ½ a beef in that freezer and we didn’t have money for such a mistake. 

Building a House and Living at the Farm 

o   While living at Irvington, our family picked out a spot for us to build a new house on the farm. The place that we picked was in the woods so dad went around and marked the trees he wanted a dozer to take out but instead, the dozer took out all the trees without a marker so totally messed up dad’s plan.  We then moved the house back 200 feet and pop had the dozer clean off a place for the house.  That was all fine except the dozer covered up a sink hole with dirt and, while he packed it in good, that hole has caused problems with the cement floor in the basement ever since.  It’s not a terrible problem but one that cracks floor tile.  Lisa says this differently than I do.  She says, “First, we had to clear out all the brush in a fun family project.  Then, mom and dad we wrapped ribbons around the trees they wanted left alone.  But some ass-wad moved the ribbons and the selected trees went kaput.  Subsequently, mom and dad then pushed the house location back directly on top of a moving rock formation.  Today, we have cracked tiles, uneven door frames, uneven floors, windows that won't open, etc.  The original goal was to have a walk out basement but ass-wad messed up our entire plan.”  That house is not as bad as Lisa says but she makes the story better.

o    We built the footers and then used forms to build the basement walls from concrete.  Those walls had brick put on the outside.  Once the forms were set, we poured the concrete and let it set for a few days to cure.  When we pulled the off, we found that the concrete was not watered enough so we had huge spots where the aggregate was exposed so that had to be skim coated.  Then we poured the basement floor (without any steel in it!), put in the metal studs in the middle of the basement to hold up the upstairs floors, and then started building the foundation of the house.  All of the lumber we used for the foundation was from Fort Knox barracks that Phillip and I denailed for years.  It was cheap, available, and made me and Phillip proud to have contributed.  Once the foundation and structure were framed out, that was the end of Fort Knox lumber so new doors, windows, plumbing fixtures and such.  With one exception.  Dad decided to use old Fort Knox flooring in the house, both the subflooring and the final flooring. The final flooring was tongue and groove solid oak flooring and we had to use a special tool to get the nails in sideways.  Those nails didn’t have heads like a normal nail, they were rectangle all the way to the top.  And the flooring was painted Army gray.  I told dad that looked awful and mom was going to have a fit.  He told me that it would be fine and that’s all he said.  So, we put all this gray flooring in like dad told us to.  Then he rented a big stand-up sander that took the gray paint off and just left the bare wood showing.  My job was to clean up after he sanded which I did dutifully.  After sanding and cleaning, he put sanding sealer on the wood and it had to be sanded again after each application.  Then he put shellack on as a final coat.  Beautiful.  He was right.  Mom loved it.  50 years later it still looks beautiful although I’m not sure they use sanding sealer and shellack like we did back then.  And I’m pretty sure the paint we removed was lead based so both the sanding AND the shellacking were probably hazardous.

o    When dad picked out a spot for the house, there was no road to it.  There was a horse trail but no real road so we went through the fields until he built a road.  He borrowed a dozer to get the road cleared out probably ¼ mile, then he had gravel hauled in and the road built back to our house.  We were definitely at the end of the road.  He ruined the dozer engine because of an oil problem and had to get that fixed but he got the road in.  As an aside, about a mile more to the east the horse trail connected with another gravel road that the county maintained. Dad went to every person along the trail and asked them to give ROW to the county so the road could be put through and maintained by the county.  They did.  Then the county cleared, cut ditches, put culverts in, and gaveled the road.  Today, that road is paved and highly used to cut off several miles if people are going to the back part of the county; the horse trail became a high speed paved road.  The trail that Phillip and I “explored” on as kids with fallen trees across it and no real way to navigate except by foot is now a paved road maintained by the county thanks to my dad.  We went from a house at the end of the road to a house on a paved road with several other houses around us on that road.  

o    There was no gas line coming to where our house was being built so our house had to be all electric which was fine. My dad installed a pot belly stove and we had lots of firewood around so heating was not a problem.  And we were outside working on the farm most of the summer so no need for cooling most of the time and after being outside, we didn’t need much cooling to feel cool.  Plus, the basement of the house stayed cool all the time so no gas, no problem.  I remember my dad saying that the house cost him $20K to build.  He was sick about spending so much money but he is cheap as hell and $20K for a new house was cheap…. even in 1971.   It is a nice house, 2-story, 2400 sq. ft., 5 bedrooms, three bathrooms, etc. 

o    Our house design was from a book that mom and dad bought.  It was for a split-level home; you came into the house through the front door to a landing and then either went upstairs to the main living area, kitchen, dining room, master bedroom and two more bedrooms for the girls.  Downstairs was to a family room, bedrooms for the boys, and a big room for a refrigerator, freezer, and sink. This room was supposed to be a garage but instead it became a room we used mostly for farm stuff, canning, and such but was converted into a kitchen when family had to move and after we had a fan catch fire upstairs and smoke the top area.  Plus, dad used it to put baby calves in when snow was hub deep to a Ferris wheel.  We never considered that a split-level house would be a problem when we all got older but it has been. When mom got to where she couldn’t get around very well, dad got a contractor in to convert the basement into living quarters with a full kitchen and laundry facilities.  He changed the wood burning stove location, (which he still uses today), made a bedroom out of the family room, made a computer and storage room out of one bedroom, converted another bedroom into a living room, and converted the farm storage room into a kitchen.  Thus, a complete house downstairs.  When mom started getting around poorly, they moved downstairs and only went upstairs for big family events like Christmas or Thanksgiving.  They installed a chair lift for the stairs and it is still in operation today.  Now, my dad is over 90 and he rarely goes upstairs.  Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays are smaller gatherings so we easily fit in the downstairs area.  Anyway, today the upstairs is used mostly by guests.  The heat or cooling is turned off or way down and it’s pretty sad to see.  The upstairs part of that house was always full of people when I was a kid and younger adult. People would just open the door and say, “knock, knock” and then come upstairs and talk.  All of us kids were there, our friends, parents’ friends, etc.  It was a vibrant and alive place.  Now, it hardly ever gets used. 

o    This was an early 70’s house so kind of funky.  The kitchen was not all that big but had orange (yes, orange) counter tops and base all the way up to the cabinets from the counters. The cabinets were painted black and they still are; over 50 years later.  After we built the house, my dad converted a deck off the kitchen into additional storage for kitchen things and the washer/dryer which helped mom a great deal.  The bathrooms were small and dark; almost an afterthought.  The master bathroom was not sufficient and had to be redone years later.  It was just a funky house but it was great for us kids.  New place, new big house, out in the woods, separate bedrooms for most of us; it was great!

o    This was a rectangle house 30 x 50, two story, designed with dirt up to the bottom windows in the front and no dirt cover in the back. It had big heavy sidling doors to a deck on the top and to a patio on the bottom.  The house was designed for laminate siding that had to be painted every few years and I did that several times.  After painting it a few times, dad put metal siding on that eliminated painting forever.  My dad changed the top patio and made it into an enclosed area where mom kept her canning stuff, extra cooking things, and the washer/dryer.  He didn’t change or strengthen the foundation so the posts carrying the weight have broken the pavement below and sunken into the ground a few inches. My dad said he poured additional concrete for those posts but something went wrong.

o    Dad used the Ledford’s to help build the house.  Ed Ledford was the dad and he had several of his sons working with him.  Ed had trouble getting paid on houses he had finished working on so he told Dad he could build the house but needed to be paid each week so he and dad settled on hourly rates and to work they went.  I believe dad was very happy with the workmanship and effort of Ed on getting this house built quickly, strongly, and well.  I enjoyed working with the Ledford’s over that summer and I enjoyed being a part of building this house; I was very proud of it.  However, the Ledford’s got paid each Friday and I begged Ed to turn in my hours as well and I doubt that he did because he didn’t want to mess his relationship up with dad but I know for sure that I worked on that house without wages all summer.  But he did feed me, put up with my BS, and gave me a place to live so I probably should have shut up about it.  But I did not. 

o    We were planning to move in to our house in late summer of 1972 but someone got into dad’s tools he was using for building the house and stole them.  Dad decided that me and Phillip could move in to our rooms to keep thieves out and we did. The upstairs was not yet ready so he had more work to do on that.  I don’t remember how long we were in the house before the rest of the family moved in but it wasn’t too long.  We worked on the house a lot while working on the farm and other things.  After the house was completed enough for everyone to live in, we built a shed for equipment and for stripping tobacco, a farrowing house for hogs, and started on a barn.  

o    We used cedar trees to make the foundation poles for out buildings and then we used Fort Knox lumber to build the rest of the sheds.  That outer coat is still on the buildings today, it’s wood from Fort Knox barracks, and I’m sure it was painted with lead-based paint.  We were after the wood on the interior of the barracks and the wood used to build the frame for out house; the wood for the sheds was left over or exterior barracks wood.  The floor of the house was completely tongue and groove and under that was 2 x 12’s on 16-inch centers. The roof was 2 x 6’s and 2 x 8’s and there were 2 x 4’s everywhere in the 50 x 200’ two-story barracks. We had 60 days to get the barracks down and the area cleaned off.  We tore down the barracks and hauled lumber with nails still in it resulting in piles of lumber everywhere we lived.  Denailing boards was something me and Phillip did for years then we would put the denailed wood inside a barn to protect it from the weather.  Scrap or broken wood we would burn as kindling.  My dad and his friends had to bid on these barracks and the first one he got, he bid $16.  Yes.  Sixteen dollars and got it.  The last one, he bid $250 and got it so word must have gotten out about how cheap they were.  I remember we took the windows out of the barracks and sold them for hundreds of dollars getting in the green right away.  Don’t get me wrong, this was dangerous work because we didn’t use big equipment; it was just ladders and crow bars, manual labor, and pickup trucks.  Fort Knox was about 40 miles away from where we lived so it was a situation to travel there, work, haul wood home, plus my dad had a job at Olin Chemical plant and he farmed.  Sheesh.  At the end, my dad would get a contractor in to finalize everything by cleaning the pad and hauling everything else to the dump.

o  We had a deck off the kitchen and we used to throw out food scraps to our dog and cats after we ate.   One time, we threw out some pork chop bones and I went on the deck and found a cat with both her bottom and top teeth stuck in the pork chop. She could not get loose from the bone and she was in bad shape. I decided to get pliers and remove the bone.  That cat was pissed about being stuck and she was angrier with me for getting the pliers and trying to remove the bone.  I got her loose finally and she didn’t scratch or bite me but it was touch and go for a while.  My dad came out to see what in the world I was doing after he heard all of the noise.  He said he would have fixed that with one .22 bullet.  Then he told me to get to work.  He was hard core back then. 

o  Lisa remembers that when the family moved in, she got her own room and she thought it was awesome!  Plus, the new house had a dishwasher so she figured her Cinderella Housework Days were over until mom advised they were not; they only allowed the dishwasher to be used for special occasions.  Otherwise, it was wash cloths and dish towels.  No life of leisure for Lisa.  We didn’t have a water softener when we built the house and the water was hard and full of lime.  That lime messed up close and dish washers. That first dishwasher we put in only lasted two years before it had to be replaced.  After several replacements, dad finally decided to get a water softener.  Before the softener, the water smelled like rotten eggs and Diane refused to drink it. 

o  After a time at the new house, Rebekah came to Lisa’s room and BEGGED Lisa to share a room with her. Apparently, Lou-Ann was driving Rebekah crazy with her messiness/filthy ways; like leaving partially eaten chicken legs under the bed. After a sufficient amount of begging, Lisa gave Lou-Ann her room and moved in with Rebekah. Lou-Ann immediately drew, as Lisa calls it, “a stupid, ugly Unicorn on the wall.”  Rebekah and Lisa got along famously after the swap and they still do today.

o  I started school in Meade County after we built the house and I was a sophomore in high school.  We had a big assembly with all students and the principal talked to the students and said, “everyone who has a class schedule already is dismissed. Those without a schedule stay and we will build you one.”  I didn’t have a schedule and there was maybe 20 of us left out of several hundred students.  The first thing I learned was that some mandatory classes I had as a freshman in Breckenridge County were offered to sophomores in Meade County and vice versa.  So, I had to take several classes with freshmen and one of them was Social Studies with Ms. Corum.  She was a great teacher and I was one of the smartest in my class.  We’d have competitions in groups where we would have to recall various social studies events and I was great at that.  We always won and after a while, I was no longer allowed to compete.  I was finally in my own peer group with people my age.  I was the youngest in the sophomore class and I was always a little behind them.  With the freshman class, I was one of the oldest and ahead of them!  That was fabulous.  The next year I had another mandatory class withs her and she bragged on me to the class when we did introductions but I was not as good in that class because I was back with the juniors.  That mattered a lot!

o    When I started making my schedule, I learned that English was split up into quarterly offers so I just had to take what was left over.  The first class I took was American Witchcraft because I had no other choice. Can you imagine taking such a class?  When my mom found out, she called the school to try and get me in something else but had no luck.  The only thing I remember is the Salem Witch trials and I doubt that class lasted very long as an option for students.  I imagine the teacher rolled her eyes when it was assigned to her. 

o    I also had to take Sophomore composition with Ivy Hawkins.  Ivy Hawkins was an odd duck but a great teacher and very hard on me which I deserved; she taught my mom 20 years earlier.  She told us she used to be a PE teacher but decided she wanted to teach English so she went back to school at Peabody College. She said she got her first book when she went back to college and looked up three of first four words to understand them and just cried. She did not play on work or grades and she was hard on all of us including me. Especially me. Behind her back I called her “The Virginia Creeper” which I assumed was a type of Ivy.  One time she gave us an assignment on figures of speech and I thought it was parts of speech and I worked hard on the assignment but as I heard others respond to her on their assignment, I learned I had misunderstood.  When she called on me, I told her I didn’t do the assignment.  I lied and I got, as she called it, “a big fat F” but I just did the wrong thing and I never did tell her.  I got an overall “C” in the class but C means continue so I was good.  Later in the year, the Future Farmers of America (FFA) chose one teacher to give an award to during our annual banquet and it was part of the FFA schmoozing effort and I was a schmoozer of the highest order. I was asked, therefore, to see if Ms. Hawkins was coming to the banquet and if not, to make sure she did come.  I went to talk with her and she said she was not coming so I told her we wanted to give her an award for being such a great teacher and helping out the FFA students along the way.  I thought she was going to cry.  Mission accomplished!  She came, got her award, and fawned all over us.

o    I took creative writing with her as a senior and she said, “Mr. Powers, why are you in this class?  You have never done well in my classes.”  I said, “You are a good teacher and I need to learn creative writing.”  Schmoozer.  I did a lot better in that class both because I tried harder and because I schmoozed Ivy Hawkins.  Mostly because I tried harder. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

o  As a sophomore, when I made my schedule and had to take the leftovers the only two electives available were agriculture and typing.  I signed up for both.  Typing had almost all girls in the class and one of them was my sister Lisa.  I couldn’t worry about schmoozing the girls in the class which I wanted to do but I had to worry about beating my sister in timed typing tests.  When we took these tests, each student would take their finished tests up to the teacher to grade so everyone knew who was first.  I always beat her on the timed tests.  And I also had to beat her in the overall grade.  I believe I beat her in the overall grade but I’m not as sure of this. As I type this using a word processor, I am reminded that I learned to type using a manual typewriter and when you got to the end of a line, the typewriter would “ding’ to remind you to do a carriage return.  When you made an error, you had to use correction tape or correction fluid to make changes.  In class, when you made an error, you just proceeded; it was part of the grading criteria.  Your speed and your error rate are how you were graded.  I can tell you this about that class; in six week I learned to type.  I’m not really sure how that happened but all my life I’ve used this skill and I’ve seen others who hunt and peck to type and I so much appreciate what I learned to do in high school.  Later in my life in the Air Force and after, I’ve used this skill so much and it only took me six weeks to learn it.  It was just luck that I took typing.  At that time, typing was considered a “girl skill” and I would have never taken it if other things were available to me.

o    I joined FFA as it was part of the agriculture classes I was taking and it brought me into a different world I did not know existed.  I was able to use my schmoozing skills as well as the skills I learned on the farm at home so it was an easy “A” for me but more importantly, it gave me a base in the high school and a solid place in High School.  There were lots of farm kids back then and no girls in either Ag or FFA; I don’t think they were banned; I just believe that was the social mores of the day.  Girls were taking office administration, home economics, and so forth back then.  Today girls are equally involved in Ag and FFA and most kids at school are not farm kids so things have changed significantly. 

o    I was a year behind everyone else in Ag because I started as a sophomore but I got involved in everything and helped with anything so my senior year, I was selected as Chapter Secretary.  When we opened the meeting, each of us had a motto to recite and mine was, “I correspond with other secretaries wherever corn is grown and Future Farmers meet.”  I know. Corny.  But I still remember that today.  And I was a great secretary.  Every year there was a competition for Chapter Meeting Team and we’d have to use Roberts Rules of Order to manage the meeting and there would be a judge who would inject several things during the meeting to make sure we could manage them.  Our chapter, led by Mr. Greer and Mr. Streeble, had won the state Chapter Meeting Team competition a couple of times and had never failed to go to state.  But we failed.  Our president got a little mixed up on one issue and we finished 2^nd in the region and failed to go to state for the first time in years. That was a disaster and we were admonished by past local FFA leaders for our failure.

o    We were doing FFA competitions in extemporaneous speeches where they would give you a topic and five minutes to prepare and then off you go to speak for 5 or 10 minutes.  The main topics are simple like Beef Cattle, Hogs, Sheep and so on but you are given very specific topics to discuss and that is what your speech has to be about.  I remember one time our chapter president was giving a topic on sheep and he couldn’t remember what male sheep were called so he said, “bull sheep” instead of ram.  He did not do well.  I was supposed to go to the competition when I was a senior but that was the day April 3, 1974, and we had terrible tornado’s that day so I was unable to go.  More on the tornado later.

o    Every summer we went to FFA camp which was in Breckenridge County and it was there that I learned to swim.  There were opportunities to take optional classes and one I took was beginning swimming because I didn’t know how.  During that one week, I learned to swim.  I was not a great swimmer even after that but at least I knew I would not drown in water.  I also remember we were giving a Chapter Meeting Team competition preview and we were doing our motto’s and after mine, the camp leader stopped us and said, “that is exactly how you are supposed to say your motto.”  I was so proud.  Another optional class I took was softball and I was great at that; one of the best there.  I remember there was one out and the guy batting in front of me popped out and the other team started coming in.  I told them to wait because we only had two outs. Then I smacked one beyond the left fielder and started a rally for us.  I was so proud of that. I know, dorky but not for a high school kid.

o    Every year we had to build a farm plan for the next year and that is what they used to select awards at the banquet.  Not on what you had done but what plan you had.  Stupid.  I wrote up a big plan for a lot of cows and hogs (which never happened) and received the Chapter Star Farmer award.  I was so proud to receive that award and my parents were shocked.  After they saw my plan, they were even more shocked.  I had grand ideas because I was a dreamer.  We did have a big farm and a lot of cows but they were all dads.  I went over my plan with mom and dad after the banquet and they squashed it….that was kind of a bummer.

o    A fundraiser the FFA was involved with was selling popcorn during home football games. This was a huge money maker for us and I was in charge of making and bagging the popcorn while others would carry the popcorn out and sell to spectators. I liked salt so I salted up the popcorn good and again, Mr. Streeble came in and said, “boys, the popcorn is too salty, I’m getting complaints.”  He showed me how much salt we should add and no more and that is what we did.  Seemed like Mr. Streeble had to correct me a lot.

o    When I was a senior, I tried out for the basketball team.  I was short but I could jump high and was a pretty good athlete. I could not dribble without looking at the ball and I could not shoot very well but I went out anyway. The coach said the team was great and might go far that year and then he began running drills.  I was awful because everyone knew the drills except me.  Then we ran wind sprints and they ran me out of the gym.  That was the end of my high school basketball career.  Our basketball team was very good but failed to get out of the regionals my junior and senior year.  They underperformed.

o    I tried out and made the baseball team when I was a senior but my dad said I had to quit because I had farm work to do.  I did not quit.  I did not play much but I went to every game.  I was called on to pinch run one time but did not move from the base I was on.  I was called on to pinch hit once when we were getting killed and no one could hit ball off the guy pitching.  I got him to a full count then bounced out to second.  One of the best players told me, “At least you put the bat on the ball, the rest of us couldn’t even do that.”  One pinch run and one pinch batting attempt was my total contribution to the high school baseball team.  But at least I played. My dad was hacked but I did it anyway. 

o    FFA had several duties at the Meade County Fair and I was involved with all of them.  The chapter was compensated for one of them but the others were gratis.  The compensated one was parking cars.  Our job was to put cars in rows as they parked to manage the available parking and show people what to do.  We received no instruction for this so I parked cars four deep and a person said, “I won’t be able to get out” but I told him, “Yes you will.”  I don’t know what I was thinking. He complained to Mr. Streeble who came out and said, “whoa boys what are you doing?”  He got us squared away and I did it correctly from then on.  I received clear instruction.  I guess I thought we would get those cars out magically.  There was a Mr. and Mrs. Meade County Fair competition and I competed one year.  The MC asked everyone questions and the first question he asked me was what grade I was in.  I answered incorrectly since it was summer, I answered for the last year but no matter; end of competition for me.  I also helped with the tractor pull.  Back then tractors in the tractor pull came off the farm and there were no others like they have now with alcohol fuel, etc. The trailer used was an old farm trailer with weights on it and as the trailer came by, FFA boys would add more weight and that was my job.  Farmers would be in the stands watching and you could really tell which tractor type pulled the best which would translate into sales for local tractor dealer.  For sure you could tell which tractors pulled the worse and those were badly ridiculed.  When I was involved, the worst pulling tractors were David Brown and I don’t think they are around any longer.  The last thing I remember about the Fair was the carnival.  I only took $5 to the carnival and that was plenty to ride the rides and play a few games. It was fun but the carnies were gross and were barking out to use this or do that.  My dad told me to stay away from the games because when he was a kid, he spent $20 on one game and he won what he called, “a piece of junk.”  I think he was trying to show off for a girl and probably won something for her. 

o    On April 3^rd, 1974 there was a significant tornado outbreak in the eastern United States and mostly southern Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and south.  We had one in Meade County and it was awful destroying much of Brandenburg where Meade County High School was located.  I remember cleaning up afterward and there would be hay straw driven into wooden fence posts, silage storage towers clipped down to the ground, houses and barns destroyed, and electrical sub-stations wiped clean leaving nothing but concrete bases on which the electrical equipment stood.  My brother and my cousins and I were out feeding cows and doing other farm work when we saw the tornado and it sounded like a freight train.  We were looking for a low place to get into so the four of us jumped into a hole between the barn and the house and there was a lot of noise and wind but after that, the skies cleared and we thought everything was good. My cousins called their mom who was working at the Olin Chemical plant and told her all about it.  She was not that impressed but a few minutes later the tornado would rip through Brandenburg where the chemical plant was located and shut them down.  Luckily, the plant was not in the path of the storm; it was missed by ½ a mile. 

o    My mom was going to Brandenburg to get my youngest sisters who were taking piano lessons from a lady in her home which ended up being directly in the path of the tornado.  My mom needed gasoline so she stopped at the service station and watched the power poles move back and forth from tension being placed on them from the tornado just down the road. The service station did not have any power and Roy Southerland, the service station owner, told mom to abandon her car and come with him to his home just a little down the road.  She did and they got in the basement of his house and weathered the storm.  After the tornado went through, my mom told Roy she needed to go get her girls so he took his car toward Brandenburg.  They could only get about two miles away from where the girls were because of debris in the road so Roy parked and mom ran to where the girls were.  Roy said that live electrical wires were popping, people were walking around bleeding, wounded and dead people were being pulled out, trees, power poles, debris from homes, and cars were all over the road but mom kept running to get to her girls. 

o    The girls were taking piano lessons and there was the teacher and three girls taking lessons and they heard the tornado coming but wasn’t sure what it was so the teacher tried to open the front door but couldn’t because of the pressure so they tried to go into the basement for shelter but couldn’t get that door open either and finally my sister Rebekah pushed all four of them toward one corner of the house when it became clear they didn’t have any other choice.  When the tornado passed, the corner they were in was the only corner of the house left standing.  In fact, it was the only part of any structure left standing in that entire neighborhood.  All of them survived which was a miracle.  The tornado killed over 30 people in Brandenburg that day.  They set up a morgue at the high school because we didn’t have anything else. The main funeral home was destroyed by the tornado and we had no hospital.  Then when it was time for funerals, we had one big funeral for everyone in the high school gymnasium.  It was a sight you don’t want to see with about 30 caskets, lots of tears, much sadness, and a ton of bewilderment as well as a need to clean up and rebuild. 

o    My mom finally reached the house where the girls were, found them alive and pulled everyone out of that corner of the house.  She said they had glass in their hair and scratches all over them but basically ok.  Roy finally caught up with mom and said told her they had to be careful going back to the car because of all the live wires and such which mom said she didn’t even remember when going to find her girls.  Mom was the mama bear and she was focused on her girls putting her own life in danger to find them.  But they got home safely and when they got home, we had no electricity but I had no idea about what they had been through and I was supposed to go to the FFA Extemporaneous Speaking completion that night and I was pissed because she was making me late but when I heard the story, I shut up and was just happy everyone was ok.  It was surreal to me.  Anyway, my sister Rebekah pushed everyone into the only corner that was left standing and the basement they were trying to get into was full of debris from the house; the house just caved in on top of it.  If they had gotten into the basement, I’m not sure they would have survived.

o    My dad came home a few minutes later and I’ll never forget him turning into the driveway, going way to fast and the front end of his car bouncing up and down. Whenever my dad was upset or when he was tickled his eye would twitch so he could not hide his emotions at all and when he got out of that car, we were all in front of the house.  They wouldn’t let a bunch of people leave the plant because they had to shut it down and it took a lot of workers to do that.  But they let my dad go because of where the girls were.  He was trying to drive into Brandenburg but only got a little way and he was stopped. He told they guy who stopped him that his girls were taking piano lessons and he told the guy where and was told, “there is nothing left up there.”  My dad was freaked out.  He went home to see who was there and he found us all there safe and sound, the girls safe thanks to mom.  I never saw him so emotional as he was that day.  He was worried and he was thankful everyone was ok and he too was bewildered a little.  When he got to leave, he promised everyone on his team at the plant he would check on their families so he had to vamoose but for as long as I live, I’ll never forget the look on his face when he saw all of us alive and ok. 

o    I was 16 when the tornado hit and I remember it like it was yesterday.  There were no early warning sirens in Brandenburg, there were few radar stations, there was no doppler radar, and the tornado just came in a wiped much of the town out.  There was one section of town where all the black people lived and it was totally wiped out. There was a dairy that provided milk to the school and it was wiped out. Plus, over 30 people died; one was a girl I went to school with who was 16 was one of the victims.   When we finally ventured out, we could not believe the devastation.  We helped clean up for weeks and I remember the Amish helped clean up and they were great help, worked hard, and did a good job. 

o    I think it would be true to say I was a bad kid when I was growing up.  I didn’t get into trouble or anything and I was a fairly good student and a good kid at school but I was bad at home.   A part of that was just being a kid, part of it was just being a boy child, part of it was coming from a broken home, part of it was growing up with step-mother whose buttons I could push at any time but most of it was plain meanness.  I wasn’t lazy at all, I worked hard, I went to church every Sunday, I tried to act like the perfect angel all times except at home.  Not sure why I acted like that but I did.  I think I drove my parents crazy a little bit and I sure showed my sisters what NOT to do in the house or else they would get bopped.  Because we had non-family at our house a lot of the time, I behaved during those times and a lot of time when it was just us but every once in a while, I’d act out. 

o    Lisa remembers and me and mom fought a lot.  Sometimes the fights were on Lisa’s behalf because mom treated her differently than Rebekah and Lou-Ann and I called her out on it.  Wasn’t pretty scene but mom went to Lisa and asked if that was true.  Lisa, not wanting to get her plate broke, said mom did not treat her differently but really, she did.  How could she not.  Once, Lisa had a fever and sinus infection but mom wouldn’t let her be sick; she thought she was faking so she made Lisa strip tobacco with the rest of us with a high fever.  I threw a fit and mom finally let Lisa go in to start dinner but the whole-time mom was saying Lisa being sick was “all in her head.”  But hey, she was a person and she made mistakes but more importantly, she was our mom and we needed a mom. 

o    One time, I smarted off to mom at the dinner table and you need to know that we all ate at one time so the dinner table would have up to 9 people eating at once.  It was a big deal and something we all did.  No one ever ate in the living room or in their bedroom; during meals it was expected for everyone to be at the table.  During this one meal, I smarted off to mom when I was in one of my moods and the next thing I know, I’m on the floor with an angry dad standing over me, lecturing me.  He bopped me good and I deserved it.  I apologized to him and mom immediately and then we ate.  I can tell you that was the quietest meal we’d ever had together.  With a large family, there was usually lots of banter and there was never a quiet moment.  Later dad came to my room and explained that I could never talk to my mom like that; she was great to me and didn’t deserve that.  The only thing I could think of to say was, “Yes sir.”  Probably the right thing to say.

o    Lisa remembers that her and Rebekah were cleaning up Pop’s workshop in the basement.  Their system is that Lisa would pull the cords hanging on the rafters one way and Rebekah would sweep that area.  But one cord was attached to a welding torch and it fell over slamming down on her big toe. Lisa was running around the house in pain and Pop asked Mom if he should take me to the doctor. Mom shrugged indifferently.   Dad decided to drive Lisa to Brandenburg to see the physician.  The was the only time Lisa ever remembers being put first and she found it wonderful.  The physician said her toe was not broken but had a lot of pressure from blood pooling behind the toe nail so he heated up a piece of medal, touched her toe nail, it quickly melted through and blood poured out.  Wasn’t fixed but felt a lot better!  When Lisa and dad returned home, Aunt Gerry was there with a “pain pill” what was really a placebo.  Aunt Gerry told mom that if Lisa thought it was strong medicine, it would help.  It did not. 

o    Lisa said her foot only hurt when it was on the floor so she hiked it up whenever she could.  The next day, Mom came home with groceries and told us girls to put them away and clean the living room/kitchen area. Soon as Mom left, Lisa told Lou-Ann to get up and help. She was busy watching cartoons and eating potato chips. Lou-Ann looked at Lisa with disinterest and said simply, " No."   Then Lisa told Rebekah she needed to help. Rebekah starting yelling then Lisa started yelling then they both starting working. They kept yelling until they started laughing.  I think this was the foundation of Lisa’s and Rebekah’s relationship today.  They are really close and closely aligned.

o    After I won the FFA Chapter Star Farmer award I decided that dad should end the farm partnership with his sister Gerry and Barbara who also had an interest in it.  My goal was to do what I said I would do to get the Star Farmer award. Dad must have been thinking about a partnership split already because he agreed. I went to tell Barbara and Gerry. I told them why, I told them what I was thinking, and I was very honest.  Barbara hardly said anything. But she drank a few beers then came up to our house rip roaring mad.  She yelled at me, she yelled at my dad, she brought all of our equipment that we had shared up to our house and dropped it off and I guess the partnership ended right then. I’m sure there is more to the story but that is what I remember.  I’m not sure this was the right thing to do but Barb and Gerry eventually moved off the farm, split the farm up into farmlets and sold their interest.  I think dad bought some of their land but that is all I know. I’m sure there is more to the story but I don’t know it.

o    On our farm, before and after the split, I was deeply involved in every aspect.  I remember that we sowed Clover, Timothy, and Johnson grass in one field; pop like to sow clover because it was a legume which put nitrogen in the soil and keep it partly fertilized.  We used to cut that field four times a year and when he started growing alfalfa, he’d cut that maybe six times a year.  But the clover field I remember was so thick that the hay was falling over on itself the first time we cut it.  The mowing machine on the tractor had to be in low gear to cut the hay right and then when it came time to rake it into windrows, the rows would be so tall that the rake could barely do the work.  When it came time to bale it, we’d have to put the bailer in granny gear and still watch so the bailer didn’t get in a bind and break a sheer pin.  I don’t remember how many bales we made on 30 acres but our bales would be like 4 feet apart and it took hours to load it onto wagons and store it in the barn or in stacks in the field. This was just before round bales started being made so all of our bales were rectangle. When we split the farm up, we didn’t have a barn built yet so we’d stack the hay into giant stacks in a field beside trees where it wouldn’t be in the way of haying the field and then we’d cover it with plastic and put old vehicle tires on top and tie grass strings to other tires and had them down on the sides. We had a stack of over 2000 bales of hay and the plastic worked horribly.  The wind shredded the plastic and we found the outer bales of hay were ruined but the inner bales were fine.  It worked but not the way we planned.  After I left the farm for the Air Force, my dad immediately purchased a round baler and that was the end of the rectangle bales except for a few he kept for calves he put in the barn during weaning time. I remember being so upset that he waited until I left to get a round baler.

o    Between my junior and senior year, I worked for Howard Stith on his farm.  He was only farming and had crops, tobacco, cattle, and a farrowing house for raising hogs.  He had grain bins for holding his grain he was going to use for his own use (or sell later), had a sileage area, raised hay, had a shed he used to fix equipment, etc.  He had a big operation and I worked for him all summer in return for a cow.  One cow.  He had a Farmall H tractor with tricycle type wheels in front which were two small wheels together under the tractor. One thing I learned quickly was that those wheels would turn quick if they came upon a small hole in the ground or the ground from plowing.  When those wheels turned, there was no stopping them and if you had your hands around the steering wheel with thumb on one side and fingers on the other, the spinning wheel would whack your thumbs and if it didn’t break them, they would sure swell.  I quickly learned to put fingers and thumbs on the outside of the wheel.  Howard Stith had a big operation and I really enjoyed working with him.   He farmed for a living and he did things correctly.  He had three children, two of them were twins, and he'd come in at lunch every time I was over there and his wife would have a big lunch and the noon news on the TV so Howard could hear the weather and price reports on commodities and livestock.  I never ate so much in my life but they had rules.  One time one of the twins spilled their glass of milk and got a whipping.  The parents did not play and be advised I was careful not to spill or make a mess!

o    My dad had some sows and pigs and we raised the pigs to 220 lbs. and then sold them.  One day the pigs got out so mom and the girls had to try and get them in.  They worked all day to keep the hogs off the road but could never get them in the hog pen.  My dad came home, got a bucket of feed, shook the bucket, and hogs came running to the pen for the feed.  My dad told my mom and the girls, “In order to get the hogs into the pen, you have to be smarter than the hogs.”  That did not sit well with my mom and she said the next day that either her or the hogs had to go.  The hogs went and I mean quickly.  We raised hogs to sell but we had others that we butchered to eat but after the big hog escape, we had no more hogs on the farm.

o    Mr. PE Smith, our next-door neighbor raised hundreds of hogs with a big farrowing house and he raised the hogs up to 220 lbs. and then sold them for slaughter.  He used to get expired bread products from a plant in Louisville and feed them to the hogs.  There were biscuits, rolls, and other treats and the hogs loved them.  PE built a house on his farm and he had a giant picture of a hog above his fire place.  He put that picture up there and he said, “He didn’t want anyone to forget what paid for his house and his farm.”  He had all son’s and his oldest was Rick and when PE slowed down on farming, Rick was the main farmer.  He had a major crush on Lisa in high school but she didn’t like Rick; I guess he was not exciting enough for her.  He also had a son named Tim and he was a ruffian.  Tim and I got into tussles over and over and he was always whipping my behind even though I was older.  Tim later died after I left for the Air Force. 

o    I had a field of cucumbers (that we called pickles) in the corner of one of our hay fields and it was about an acre.  I found one day that ground hogs made holes all around our pickles and they would come out and eat pickles and make a mess when we were not around.  I talked to my dad and he said to “pour a little gasoline” down the holes and light it on fire.  I decided to do this so I got 5 gallons of gasoline and poured it down several of the holes; not a little gasoline, 5 gallons!  After that, I waited 5 minutes or so to let the gas permeate then lit a piece of cloth and threw it into one of holes.  My gosh.  The gas and gas fumes caught fire and exploded for quite a few minutes.  It sounded like we were having an earthquake and I was kind of scared.  It was a loud and long commotion. This was a dangerous thing to do but it worked; we had no more ground hog problems after that but I never did that again.  I was lucky the first time and I wasn’t taking that chance again. My mom and my siblings were picking pickles while all this was going on but before I lit the fire, I got them out of the field.  With all the commotion I caused, they thought I was going to be on the 6:00 pm news or something and they immediately told dad what I had done. Since everyone was ok, he laughed and laughed. He asked if I planned to do that again and of course, I told him the truth; no way!

o    We didn’t have a cattle trailer so we hauled livestock to the farm, from the livestock auctions, to the slaughter house, to the veterinarian, and so forth using racks on the back of my dad’s pickup. These were wooden racks held together with pins that connected the corners of the racks together. Dad would tie grass strings around them as extra protection.  When the cows moved around the whole truck would move around so kind of unnerving.  One time, we stopped along the side of the road to check everything and one of the cows had her leg caught in the racks and it was sticking out. She was ok but we worked our butt off to get her leg back in with the truck jammed with cows.  Another time, Barbara wanted to put a bull in her truck and take it somewhere but she had shorter racks on her truck.  She backed her truck up to the loading chute and started to put the bull in the back.  The first thing he did was tear her tail gate up; too heavy I guess but he ripped it up as he walked. Then he jumped out of the truck over the short racks, onto her hood and escaped without injury.  Her truck was not as lucky.  It had the tail gate ruined and a huge dent in the hood.  She never used her truck again for hauling cattle.  

o    Dad got a dairy calf from someone who wanted to get rid of the calf so they could get the milk from the cow.  He didn’t have racks on his truck at the time so he put the calf in a grass sack with only its head sticking out.  While he was driving the calf escaped from the sack so my dad quickly pulled over, got the calf, and put it in the cab of the truck while he went through the town of Irvington.  The calf was hungry so he decided that he could get some milk by sucking on dad’s ears.  Which is what he did.  My dad kept pushing him off but the calf kept coming back all the way through Irvington.  After he got out of town, he stopped and put the calf back in the grass sack and came home.  When he got home, he told mom all about the event and what happened. Later, someone who worked with mom driving a school bus saw this event in Irvington and was telling mom, “You will never believe what I saw, some guy was coming through town in Irvington today and had a calf in his truck and the calf was sucking on his ear.  I thought I had seen it all but I guess I hadn’t.”  Mom did not tell her it was dad; she just kept her thoughts to herself.  As an aside, we bottle fed that calf until it was big enough to eat grain and hay on its own then raised to be a good milk cow for us. 

o    When we milked the cow after the cow had a calf, we’d wait for a week after the calf was born so the cow would get all the colostrum out of her system to get the calf going then come milking time, we’d milk the front two teats and the calf would take the back two.  When the calf was gone, we’d milk all four and we had more milk than a big family could possibly drink.  If we didn’t need the milk, I would just feed it to the hogs and they loved it.  If we did need the milk, I’d take it to the house and the girls would strain it through a dish towel and put it in the refrigerator.  We did no such thing as pasteurize it; we would simply strain the milk and then drink it.  We were poor farmers so we didn’t know any better I suppose. 

o    I remember that we would take hogs and cows to the slaughter house and then get cardboard boxes full of meat wrapped in white packages with the contents labeled.  That was a major part of sustenance for us and I don’t think we would have survived without it.  One time, dad took a hog in and got the bacon sugar cured which made it salty and good.  The bacon was attached to what was the side of the hog and we’d cut off what we needed then cook it.  I’m sure it was not good for us but it sure was good to eat.  Those bacon slices were thick and delicious.  During the summer, we would can, freeze or store beans, peaches, carrots, potatoes, pickles, corn, so in addition to the meat we slaughtered, we had vegetables from our own garden for use throughout the year.  

o    My uncle Bobby Hubbard gave me a .22 rifle on my 12^th birthday but dad wouldn’t let me have any ammo unless there was a specific reason for it. We had trouble with wild dogs coming around the house and they would chase cows I guess trying to get to a young calf.  Once a dog chased a cow, they received a death sentence from dad and I’d go kill them as instructed.  My dad was not playing around on wild dogs so if any came to our farm, they didn’t last long.  One time, I decided to go squirrel hunting with my .22 and these stupid squirrels would come out on a tree branch and start screeching at one another so I killed quite a few of them.  Then I cleaned them and brought them to the house where mom cooked them so we could have a squirrel meal for the entire family.  They were NOT good and that was the end of my squirrel hunting days.  My dad always said what we killed we would eat so no more squirrel killing for me.

o    I was working at Howard Stull’s one day and the school superintendent in charge of buses said he was looking for a school bus driver and wondered if Howard knew anyone. I told he and Howard that my mom would be interested in that because she had told me in the past she was.  I’m not sure how it happened but my mom got the job and was a bus driver for over 20 years after that.  She got paid terribly but she was a good driver and a good person for driving all of us kids.  Of course, we were the first kids on the bus so I had to get up early, milk the dang milk cow, then get ready for school and get on the bus to ride with her. Not sure how early that was but it was early. Then we had to ride on the complete bus route with her and we were the last one’s home. Since my mom was the driver, I thought I could get away with stuff so I took a farm knife that I had and cut another kids shirt.  I got in huge trouble. First, I had to sit in the front row when I was a senior boy and the back row was my birthright,  Second, I had to buy the kid a new shirt and third, I had to apologize to the kid and his parents.  Mom told me to leave my farm knife at home from then on so I did.  Finally, mom got paid terrible for this job and right at the end of her driving, the bus driver group found out that they had been underpaid for years so mom got about $20,000 which she invested in the stock market and grew it to about $500,000 before losing a little.   My dad used a lot of that money when mom got sick for caregivers so it was used for a good purpose and very much helped them care for mom at home before she passed away.

o    One day me and mom got in a fight about something when dad was not home.  I was walking to by bedroom in the basement when mom said something like “Hey, Buddy. Listen to me and then threw a shoe at me.  I threw one back then went to my room and unbolted my rifle.  It was on a gun rack and the ammo was in a drawer so was just a show but freaked the rest of the family out. They thought I had gone mad so my mom and sisters got into a closet and hid.  Lisa figured the closet was not safe so she “carefully” walked to my room calling out my name softly. When she got to my room, she said I was sitting on my bed, back straight, fists clenched, face red, huffing and puffing.  She said I was scaring her and everyone else and that was wrong.  So, I sprung up from the bed and opened the bolt to show Lisa it was not armed but she went away yelling, "Timmy, you're crazy!!"   When she got to the staircase, she remembered that I would never hurt her which is right.  I was just showing her the rifle was not armed. 

o    I was working for Howard Stull the summer between my junior and senior year and I had been out with a girl from Guston at the outdoor movie show.  She had given me a bunch of hickies on my neck and it looked pretty bad.  Howard and his wife asked me about it and I told them I was changing a muffler on a car and it fell and bruised me.  They called total BS on that which they should have and Howard said, “Timmy, people talk and that is bad enough but if you put yourself into a life altering situation, that will limit your opportunities.  So be careful about what you are doing and don’t do anything to put yourself in a bad situation.  I understand being young and all that but you need to understand that you could quickly get into an adult situation.”  I took his advice seriously and was ultra-careful from then on.  I received no such training or information from my parents so this was super important to me as Howard and his spouse were people I trusted totally.

o    We had a field we called the “back field” and it was the field farthest from the houses and we used it for haying.  We would cut the hay down and let it sit for two or three days to “cure” so it could be raked and bailed.  My dad detailed me out to the field to rake and bale it while he went to work at Olin.  This field was about 30 acres so it took a while to rake and bale.  I raked it all up into nice windrows and then started to bale.  We had a square baler (rectangle bales really) and it used twine to tie the bales up.  There were knotters on the bailer and cutters what would cut the string to the right length and it worked great.  Usually.  But every once in a while, the knotters would stop working correctly and we’d have to fix them.  Then once we got the knotters fixed, we’d throw raked hay into the bailer to make sure they worked.  This was dangerous work.  The bailer was connected to the tractor by a power take off and we didn’t have guards like they do now so dangerous.  The front of the bailer had tines to pick the hay off the ground then when it got to the top there was a rake apparatus to rake the hay into the bale maker part and then there was a compressor that mashed the hay together to help make bales. After a certain length the knotters would tie and the next bale would start.  My dad always told me to stay away from the front of the bailer, to throw hay in from the side of the bailer and then reminded me that a guy got killed on our farm earlier when he got pulled into the bailer so I was ultra-carful.  This day the knotters quit working so I had to fix them which I did; then I threw hay into the bailer like I was told and it worked great!  Nothing bad happened but it was still a scary situation regardless and I am now so glad that my dad told me about the danger over and over.  I told my dad later that I can’t believe he allowed a kid of 14 or so to do this by himself.  I told him there was no way I’d let my son do that.  He said, “ah, you grew up around the equipment so you knew what to do and not do.”  Maybe.  I never got hurt on the farm so maybe he was right.

o    I went out one night camping with two of my friends and we about froze; not enough to eat, no backpacks, not enough blankets, the three of us laying on the ground as close as possible to one another to try and keep warm. Then it got light (it was summer) and we got up because we were freezing and needed to get moving.  Plus, I had to go home because we had a bunch of hay to pick up.  My dad was an ass to me and said, he didn’t care if I was out all-night farting around that we had work to do so no mercy.  I worked my butt off that day and it was horrible.  After I milked the cow, I went to bed and slept all night after that.  I didn’t go out camping again because I was afraid my dad would once again show no mercy.  He cured me.  Maybe he thought I was out drinking or carousing but I was doing neither.  I was just trying to stay warm camping beside a big pond on the Zeitz’s farm.

o    After we built our house, dad moved from gasoline to diesel tractors because diesels used so much less fuel.  We had two Massey Ferguson 135 tractors; one gasoline and one diesel.  My dad said that the diesel would use $20 worth of fuel while the gasoline tractor $200 doing the same work.  He sold the gasoline tractors except one; the old Massy Harris that we had used for years and years.  I was filling it up with gasoline at the tank that dad kept on the farm.  That old tractor was persnickety and the high lift was either all the way up or all the way down.  It didn’t hold in any other position.  So, I was going out one day to finish plowing a small area and we had a small two-bottom plow to do this work and it attached to the three-point hitch and I had it all the way up.  Pop was working midnight shift at the plant and came down to check on me and the plow/tractor. He was behind the tractor with his house shoes on and I hopped off to fill it up with gas.  To hop off the tractor, I would put a hand on each fender and then swing off the tractor.  Only this time I hit the lift lever just a little.  That’s all it took to come crashing down on his toe.  He went to hollering and I climbed back on the tractor to start it and raise it up.  The only problem was the solenoid would sometimes hang and you had to wait for it to completely wind down before starting and then it would start fine.  This particular time, I was impatient because my dad was hollering.  Three times I tried to start it and three times the solenoid intervened.  Finally, dad just pulled his foot out from the plow and said, “Take me to the doctor.”  I got the car and took him to Irvington about 5 miles away.  We got to the doctor’s office and I was holding his house shoe with a little bit of his toe still in it.  The doctor looked at his foot, then looked at what was in the shoe and emptied the shoe into the garbage can.  He doctored on my dad a little but there wasn’t much he could do; the toe was not cut off, only the nail so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.  I never said anything but all of us wore steel toed shoes all the time and I don’t to this day know why he came out in his house shoes.  Safety first.          

o    We raised cows and sold calves for profit and it paid for everything in my life.  Every time one of us kids would get sick, dad would say, “oh well, there goes another cow.”  That wasn’t true but it gave an indication about what my dad found important. 

o    We grew cucumbers (which we called pickles) as a cash crop and cucumbers lasted only about 3 or 4 weeks but they grew fast.  We picked pickles each morning in 5-gallon buckets, empty them into grass sacks and when we got done picking, we’d have a truck bed full. We’d take them to the buyer who was just down the road from us right after picking.  The buyer had a sorting machine which sorted them by size.  The smallest ones weighed the least but were worth the most per pound so we tried to pick them as small as possible. I remember with a full pickup bed of pickles to sell; we’d get around $100.  That was a lot of money back then and I don’t know what the total cost was of the plowing, and seeds. The rest was just labor.  For a family, this was a great source of income and immediate remuneration.

o    Our main cash crop was tobacco and I went through the process for that earlier.  We had about 10,000 pounds of tobacco; some of it our base and some of the tobacco rented from others but after it was all said and done, we’d get about $1 per pound for it.  When I was in high school, I contracted with a teacher to cut, house (in a barn), then strip his tobacco.  All this was going great and I was paying my sister and brother an hourly amount to help me strip.  We were in the stripping shed and they said they were hungry so I went to the local store about a mile away to get sandwiches and a soda for them.  While I was gone, they took a bunch of the tobacco and threw it away.  I had no idea until my dad told me years later.  When the teacher sold the tobacco, he was short of his quota and asked me about it.  I told him it was all there and we stripped what was there.  That was true as far as I knew and I still don’t know how much they threw away and I guess they did that to avoid further stripping.  I don’t know this for sure, but I think this was my sister’s idea.  Sounds just like her.

o    Phillip and I went to the 7^th Street Tobacco Warehouse in Louisville after I got my driver’s license to take our tobacco in to be sold and I loved it.  Right across from the warehouse was a White Castle hamburger place and I took Phillip over there as soon as we got to the warehouse while waiting to get unloaded.  I don’t know how many “Castles” we ate but it was a bunch.  7^th street was a pretty rough neighborhood although as a kid, I didn’t really notice.  But I did notice that the restroom cost a nickel to enter.  I’d never seen anything like that before in my life!   After eating, we went back to the warehouse, where our tobacco was unloaded and weighed then they gave us a ticket to take home. It was about 50 miles to Louisville so a pretty good drive back and on the way, it began to rain so I turned on the wipers.  Problem.  The right one worked but the driver’s side had no blade so they metal just scraped the windshield.  I pulled over to the side of the road and found an old shirt under the seat, put it on the wiper blade holder, and tested it out. Worked!  I drove the rest of the way home using that.  If I had been smarter, I would have taken the blade off the passenger side but I wasn’t that bright.  A poor man has poor ways.  I used an old shirt instead.  Told my dad about it later and he just smiled and his eye blinked (because he was tickled).  He was so proud.

o    My aunt Verna invited us to go with them to Ekron Baptist Church and that changed our life.  We became members, I was baptized there, the kids were all involved in Church activities, and it was the main part of our social life.  It was our family social life although all of us kids had another social life at school, the parents had one at work, etc. but for the entire family, this was our social structure.  My dad became a deacon and taught Sunday School to the older men, my mom was a long-time Sunday School teacher to the older women and they gave lots of money to the church to help out with building projects, upgrades, or whatever.  My mom, my brother Phillip, and my sister LuAnn are buried there and it is our family spiritual home. 

o    I met LuAnne Sipes at Ekron Baptist when we were just kids and we were on again/off again girlfriend/boyfriend throughout high school and some when I went into the Air Force.  LuAnne had two brothers who were basketball stars at Meade County; one was in my grade and one was a year ahead of me.  LuAnne was a year behind me and she was best friends with my sister, Lisa.  Her relationship with Lisa was awful for me because Lisa knew stuff that I did plus she knew what LuAnne told her and Lisa had strong feelings that me and LuAnne should make things work.  So did our preacher and LuAnne’s mom.  I remember coming home on Air Force leave one time and her mom saying to me, “What a waste.”  An ouch moment.  We went to a lot of the basketball games with her family and we would smooch in the back seat of the car with her parents in the front seat.   I think now how awkward that was but I was in heat so it didn’t matter to me.  We were on again/off again mostly because I was a dumb ass with a wandering eye; I never cheated on her.  I would break up with her first, then wander around doing whatever.  Her and I got serious a few times both emotionally and physically but it was an awkward situation and after Phillip died and I went into the Air Force, the relationship was strained.  More on that in future chapters.  She was a good girl who eventually went to college at Murray State in Kentucky, then married and had children.  I really did love her and when it ended with her, I was broken hearted.

o    After my Grandpa Powers died, I inherited one of his radio’s and it was a tube-type radio that when you turned it on, it took a few seconds to warm up. This was not a transistor radio that comes on immediately. It was AM signal only so at night I could listen to the Atlanta Braves because the sound would bounce off the ionosphere and get to me.  During the day time, I could not hear the channel at all.  During the baseball season, I forbid anyone to move the tuner at any time for any reason and they did not.  I remember Hank Arron was playing then and they had a knuckleball pitcher named Hoyt Wilhelm who used to come in and pitch and there were many others.  I only listened for three seasons and they were never really good but they were my team.  The local team that everyone else watched and listened to were the Cincinnati Reds because they were closer and they were called the Big Red Machine with Johnny Bench and Pete Rose; they won often but I was an Atlanta Brave fan and that continues today. 

o    When Grandpa Powers died, he left an old Rambler automobile and somehow my dad ended up with it.  I decided it would be a good idea to rev that Rambler up a bit by spray painting the dash metallic blue.  Dashboards at that time were all metal so paint easily adhered.  There was something wrong with the Rambler at that time; it would run but would not move so thank goodness none of my friends saw that.  Not sure what happened to it but I spent many happy hours working on it and, to my mind, sprucing it up with blue metallic paint.

o    When we got older, my dad bought two Pontiac Catalina’s; one was blue and one brown but both were built like tanks.  Phillip and I were driving the blue one coming back from Midway when a pickup truck turned in front of us.  I had slowed down because I had a feeling the guy might do that so we were going 10 MPH when we collided and the other vehicle was turning so, he was barely moving also.  We got out after the incident and I checked on him and I quickly learned that they guy wasn’t too smart. He said, “Well, you slowed down so I thought you were going to let me turn.”  Nope.  I was afraid you were going to act like a dumb ass and turn in front of me which you did.  We had no seat belts back then so I just put my arms on the steering wheel and my head on my arms.  My brother, who I could see because my face was turned that way, bounced off the dash board but because we were going slowly, was not hurt.  The crash took the front end of the car including the headlights and turned it down a little so the headlights had to be adjusted but otherwise, no problem. 

o    After that the blue Catalina became a farm car and the brown Catalina, I drove a lot.  I decided it would be a good idea to soup the brown Catalina up a little by drilling holes in the hood and installing hood latches.   Was unnecessary of course because the manufacturer hood latch worked perfectly but I was a red neck kid from Kentucky so I thought this would make me look cool.  One time I had an activity to attend so I drove my bad ass brown four door Catalina with hood latches to the school to catch the activity bus and parked right beside it.  Some of my bus mates noticed that steam was rising from the car because the car had gotten hot. Kind of ruined my cool mojo. I had to get water from the school when we returned before I could head home and the bus driver helped me get a container and fill up with water. Thank goodness all of my classmates had gone by then. 

o    There were a bunch of kids at Midway that used to get together to generate meanness around the area and one time we decided to remove highway signs and throw them in a ditch.  Little did I know I’d be working for a highway department and we’d make this much more difficult through the method of attachment. Obviously, we didn’t want signs stolen but moreover, missing signs could cause danger.  Us kids didn’t understand any of that so we removed about 30 signs and threw them in a ditch in the area where they could be easily found and re-attached.  I took a few home and hung them in my bedroom.  I remember that one of the signs was a stop sign and I hope no one got hurt because of us.  That same group decided one night to take rocks and throw at mail boxes.  We hit a few but missed one so we went back to get it.  Problem was that the person whose mail box we missed, got his shotgun out and shot at us with salt.  Hit one of the guys who was hanging out the window as the trigger man so we had to take him to his house for inspection and treatment.  He was ok, thank goodness, and we learned our lesson; that was the last of the mail box destruction tour.

o    When I was a senior, our high school football team went to Paducah Tillman for a playoff game.  Football was not a big deal to me; it was just something to do until the real sport, basketball, started. This was right after the oil embargo in the Middle East started and the President asked everyone to start driving 55 MPH to conserve fuel.  Until that day, gasoline was about 29 cents a gallon.  After that, it was a lot more. I was riding down with a guy from church and I never went so slow in my life; it seemed like the longest trip. Then we got down there and our team did not get a first down all night.  Not one.  We almost got one on 4^th down but the referee put the ball sideways I guess because the guy landed with it that way and we were 1 inch short.  But short we were.  Then after the game, we had a three-hour trip back home going 55 MPH.

o    I was a junior in high school and our basketball team went to the regions.  Back then the top two teams from each district would play in the regions then only one team from each of the 16 regions would go to state.  We played Hart County, the 1^st rated team in the region in the quarter finals and we played out of our mind.  We were up by one point with three seconds remaining and Hart County had the ball.  They had a lot of good players but one great player and he had the ball, he shot from just inside half court and it was an inch long. Bounced out. We stormed the court and I was part of the storming.  For me, it seemed like something we should do; very spontaneous and very natural.  The next game we lost to Adair County because we played horribly and Adair County lost to the team that won the region.

o    When I was in High School, I became a University of Louisville Cardinal basketball fan.  Me and Lisa were the only U of L fans in the house and I think Lisa was quiet about it.  My dad said, “Where did I go wrong.”  He was a lifelong UK fan and he couldn’t understand how his children would be U of L fans.  But we were.  I became a U of L fan because UK wouldn’t recruit black players and we had a local basketball hero from the school I used to go to who wanted to go to UK but couldn’t; he was relegated to U of L where they took blacks.  Actually, U of L would take anyone.  Their coach had a heart attack and while he lived, he was told he needed to stop coaching so we just got a coach from UCLA named Denny Crum and the headline in the Courier Journal was, “UCLA throws Louisville a Crum.”  Denny Crum made Louisville immediately relevant.  They went to final four of the NCAA basketball tournament his first year but lost their first game.  Kentucky would not play Louisville and I always thought it was a racist thing.  In my senior year of high school, Sport Illustrated came out with an issue and the cover said, “College Basketball’s Mad Shuffle” and the cover was a fold out and inside it said, “Louisville has the Cards.”  Man, I was proud!  Both Louisville and Kentucky got into the Final Four and if both won the semi-final, they would meet in the final.  Kentucky played Syracuse who they easily defeated but U of L played UCLA in John Wooden’s last game as UCLA coach and the tournament was in Southern California.  U of L lost in overtime and I’m still not over it.  I watched the game at the Zeitz’s house because my house was filled with UK fans and I couldn’t stand it.  U of L lost in overtime by one point; they brought in a guy who was their starting guard the previous year but he lost the starting job when a hot shot freshman joined the team.  They would bring him in at the end of games when the other team’s only chance was to foul and all non-shooting fouls were 1 shot before 7 fouls, and 1 and 1’s after 7 fouls.  He was 22 for 22 throughout the year and U of L brought him in when they were up 1 and viola, he was fouled.  He went to the free throw line and missed.  Only time that year.  UCLA got the ball, raced down, and made a shot to win by 1.  When U of L lost, I was totally depressed for weeks. To her credit, my mother consoled me even though she was a big time UK fan; she was a mother first. UK lost by about 10 in the final and U of L would have kicked their tail if they had made the final game but we will never know for sure.  I’m still not over it.   

o    As I said earlier, I was one of the youngest persons in my class and I was one of the last to get my license just after we had started my junior year.  That was embarrassing plus I had been driving farm truck and such around all over the place which was legal if you were a farm kid as long as you were doing farm work which I was.  When I got my license, I was really a pretty good and careful driver. Except when I drank which I did from time to time.

o    I graduated High School on June 4^th, 1975 and I found out my class rank when I got my diploma; it was attached with a sticker on the back and I was 88^th out of 250.  I was so proud of that especially since I had never taken a book home ever.  I did any homework required in study hall so no need for additional study since I was a farm kid and had lots of farm work to do after school.  At my graduation, Juanita and her family came and since our class was so large, we graduated on the high school football field.  The field was at the bottom of a big bowl and the school was on top of the hill and that is where Juanita and her family met me.  One of the sisters said to me, “Tim, this is your mother.”  I was gracious but I thought to myself, “No, not really.  I have a mother and her name is Pat.”  I was happy they were there I guess but I was offended that they made such a big production out of the introduction.  This killed the mood for me and something that was celebratory because something awful and I wished then and wish now they had just not attended. As soon as the ceremony was over, I vamoosed out of there, went to a party, and got rip roaring drunk.  I don’t even remember how I got home.  It was a situation. 

Leaving for the Air Force

o    I was trying to decide what I wanted to do after graduation.  I had a good run in Agriculture and FFA and I was a farm kid so I thought maybe that was the thing to do but I figured I needed to go to the University of Kentucky and get an agriculture degree.  But I knew I was not ready for that and I figured I’d probably waste my time and my dad’s money.  Plus, we didn’t have the money for me to go but my dad said, “we will find a way to pay for it if you want to go to school.”  And he was serious.  But I was pretty sure I wasn’t ready for school or to be on my own.

o    Then one day at school, they asked anyone who thought they might want to go into the military to come take the ASVAP (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude) test.  The draft was over, the Vietnam war was over, and I could get out of class to go take this test so off I went. There were four sections of the test:  electrical, mechanical, general, and administrative. I thought, I was a farm kid so I’d kick butt on the electrical and mechanical.  When my scores came back, I had high 60’s on electrical, mechanical, and general and 95 on administration. I was embarrassed and I was afraid all my friends would find out that I belonged in Administration with the girls…….and that’s the way it was back then.  Then I went to a recruiting event after we received the ASVAP results and the Army, Navy, and Marines had big displays, recruiting bonuses, and such.  The Air Force just had a guy with an Air Force sign. He told us, “Air Force people sleep between two clean white sheets every night; we don’t go out in the field, we don’t have maneuvers, etc.  When the war starts, we send the Army, Navy, and Marines out to fight and in the Air Force, we send pilots.”  Lots less dangerous and appeared that lots smarter people joined the Air Force.  Because I was not 18 (I was only 16), I had to get my parents to sign the early enlistment forms which I did.  I signed up for Security Police because they made a big deal out of it and it sounded cool.  I was going.

Then Phillip died. More about that in the next chapter but it shook my world. The recruiter called my mom and said I didn’t have to go if I didn’t want to. He could get me off because I was the only surviving son. Mom told me that I didn’t have to go. But I wanted to go. After Phillip died, I didn’t want to be home anymore; I wanted some time away and the Air Force was the place to get it. I graduated on June 4^thand went to the Air Force on June 10^thand I never came back home. The Air Force trained me, educated me, and changed my life for the better.