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The Life of Me: An Autobiography

by Clarence Edgar Johnson · English · Gutenberg #542 · 529,981 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Life of Me: An Autobiography

Author: Clarence Edgar Johnson


        
Release date: May 1, 1996 [eBook #542]
                Most recently updated: June 1, 2012

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/542


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE OF ME: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY ***















THE LIFE OF ME

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY


Clarence Edgar Johnson



Copyright 1978


  Clarence Edgar Johnson
  2538 Chestnut
  San Angelo, Texas 76901




DEDICATION

To

  Ima, my wife

  Virgil Dennis, our first son

  David Larry, our youngest son

  and especially to our late daughter,
  Anita Joyce.




CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter
1.  Grandparents, Parents, And Our First Farm
2.  Early Childhood At The Flint Farm
3.  At The Exum Farm After I Was Five
4.  Social Living, Loving, Listening, And Learning
5.  Books, Folklore, Medicine, And Dreams
6.  Prosperity, Animals, Growing Up
7.  Dry Year On The Texas Plains, 1917
8.  Moved To Jones County.  Picked Cotton In Oklahoma
9.  Back To Our Lamesa Farm In 1919.  School At Ballard
10. Sold Farm, Moved To Hamlin
11. Road Work At Gorman, Texas
12. My Inventions And High School Days
13. My Travels To The Gulf, McCamey, And Denver
14. Haul Maize, Repair Trucks, Turn Trucks Over
15. Got Married, Drove Truck, Farmed, Cattle Drive
16. At Royston Until World War II
17. World War II Was On. We Went to California
18. Back At Royston. Worked At Gin And For Neighbors
19. Tour Pike's Peak, Moved To Arkansas, Went To College




PREFACE

This writing grew out of a request from my daughter, Anita, that
I write to her concerning me, my family, my parents and their
families; how we lived, how we grew up; our ideals, our customs,
and our social life.

The original writings were in the form of letters written to
Anita during the last few years.  When my sons, Dennis and Larry,
learned of the letters, they also asked for copies.

As I began writing, I soon realized that I knew very little about
the details of the lives of my parents and grandparents.

So I set out to tell my children a few things about myself and to
leave unmentioned some things which I do not want them to know
about me.  I also included some things about a few kinfolks and
neighbors who had a part in molding the character whom my
children now refer to as "Dad."

It was hoped that the letters would aid in their better
understanding of how certain teachings and ideals had been handed
down through generations, and that they might better understand
why they grew up under those rules and customs.

Others also may be interested in the way one family lived in the
Southwest around the turn of the century and later.

                          Clarence Edgar Johnson

(Drawing) The house where I was born

(Photo) Smokehouse at the Flint farm.   Clarence, Earl, Joel,
Albert, and Susie.

(Photo) Our Exum home

(Photo) The lake by our front yard

(Photo) Sunday morning, going to church

(Photo) At the Exum farm.   Joel, Clarence, Earl, Albert

(Photo) Our merry-go-round

(Photo) At our home on the plains.   Mama, William Robert, Ollie
Mae, Clarence, Albert, Joel, Earl




CHAPTER 1

PARENTS, GRANDPARENTS, OUR FIRST FARM

My Johnson grandparents reared nine children.  Andrew was the
oldest and was a half brother to the other eight.  Joe was
Grandma's first born, second was my father, William Franklin.
All but one of them lived and thrived and raised children.
That's why I have dozens of cousins.

When my father was born, the family lived in Bosque County,
Texas, somewhere about Meridian.  They were ranchers and owned a
bunch of cattle.  Some 20 years later we find the family in
Concho County somewhere near Paint Rock or in between Paint Rock
and where the little town of Melvin now stands.

At least two of the boys, Joe and Will, worked for the Melvin
brothers on their ranch.  I have heard Papa tell of breaking
saddle horses for the brothers as well as trail driving near San
Angelo.

In the meantime the weather turned dry, grass became scarce, and
the Johnsons drove their cattle to Indian Territory, (Oklahoma)
looking for grass in about the year of 1894--that is, all but
Joe.  He stayed with his job in Texas.

About a year after the family moved to Oklahoma, Will Johnson got
a neighbor boy to go with him back to their place in Texas to
bring another wagon load of household goods.  They were gone
about two weeks.

While the family was in Oklahoma, Will--who was about 20--taught
school two terms at Nubbin Ridge, somewhere near Duncan.
Simpson, being about 17 at the time, was not about to go to
school to a teacher who was his older brother, so he saddled his
horse and slipped away back to Melvin's ranch, to be with his
brother Joe.  He said he got tired of riding but not nearly as
tired as his horse.  The journey was about 300 miles.  He was on
the trail three days and nights and had to stop at times to let
his horse rest.  When he got to the ranch, Joe wrote to the
family saying that Simpson was with him and for them not to
worry.  They had suspected where he had gone but were not sure.

My Gaddie grandparents reared five children, three boys and two
girls.  Emma, my mother, was next to the youngest.  Hugh was her
younger brother.  When my mother was born the family lived in
Larue County, Kentucky, near Hodgensville.  Their farm joined the
Lincoln farm.  She and Abraham Lincoln drew water from the same
well but not at the same time.  The Lincoln family had moved away
some years before the Gaddies moved there.  The well was on the
fence row between the two farms.

When Emma was four years old her family moved to Dallas County,
Texas.  Then they moved to Grayson County, where Emma started to
school at age seven.  When she was nine they moved back to their
old home place in Kentucky.  Again, when she was 13, they moved
to Dallas County, and at age 16 the family moved to a farm some
eight miles southeast of Duncan, Oklahoma.

About the same time the Gaddie family moved to their farm near
Duncan, we find the Johnson family leaving Texas where the
weather turned dry and the grass became scarce and the Johnsons
drove their cattle to Indian Territory looking for grass, and
they found that grass near Duncan, Oklahoma.

They stayed in Oklahoma about four years and during that time at
least two of the boys were busy at things other than sitting
around watching cattle grow.  Andrew had married a girl named
Mary, and Will had met this pretty little freckle faced girl from
Kentucky.

So then, as you can see, here in farming and cattle country near
Duncan is where the Johnsons met up with the Gaddies.  This is
where a schoolteaching cowboy named Will met a country farmer's
daughter named Emma Lee.  This is where the falling in love took
place.  And this is where Will married Emma in the fall of 1896.
She was 18, he was 22.  They were my parents.

After living in Oklahoma that four years, Grandpa Johnson went
back to Texas looking for land to buy.  He found what he wanted
and bought 1,000 acres of unimproved land in Jones County about
three miles southeast of Hamlin.  Then he went back to Oklahoma
to get the family.

So by the time Grandpa Johnson was ready to start his journey
back to Texas with his family, the family had increased by two
daughters-in-law and two grandchildren.  Will and Emma had a son,
Frank, six weeks old.  Andrew and Mary had a daughter, Ruth, only
three weeks old.  Some thought that Ruth was too young to make
the trip in the cold of winter.  But they all came through in
wagons and drove their cattle.  That was in January of 1898.

In later years Mama told me that she thought she would have
frozen to death if it had not been for Frank in her lap to help
keep her warm.  The trip took two weeks in the dead of winter and
it rained every day of the trip.

Since there were no improvements on the Johnson land, they all
rented other farms for a year or two while they made
improvements.  Papa and Mama rented and farmed one year in Fisher
County.  Much of the well water in that county tastes so strongly
of gypsum that people have to haul their drinking water from the
better wells.  So, the story is told that when they were driving
their covered wagon to Fisher County, they stopped and asked a
man, "How far is it to Fisher County?"

The man said, "You are still about ten miles away."

"How can we tell when we get there?"

"You will see farmers hauling water in barrels in wagons."

"Have they always had to haul water in Fisher County?"

"Yes, but during the World Flood they didn't have to haul it so
far.  The flood water came within a half-mile of Roby."

I guess Grandpa farmed at least one year in Fisher County.  They
tell me that Ed, one of the younger boys, went to school in that
county at White Pond one year.

Grandpa had bought the l,000 acres for all the family.  Andrew
and Will were the first ones to buy their portions of 100 acres
each.  The raw land had cost $3 an acre.  Papa's farm cost him
$300.

Papa was fast becoming a good carpenter and he did his part in
helping build a two-story house on Grandpa's portion of the land.
The house is still in good shape and has a family living in it 77
years later.

Andrew first lived in a dugout on his 100 acres.  They used the
dugout for a kitchen and storm cellar many years after they built
a house beside it.

Papa's land was in the southeast corner of the 1,000 acre tract.
He built his house about a quarter-mile south of Grandpa's house.
It is still standing also.  Since that time some of the Johnson
boys and girls have bought and sold and swapped portions of the
land.  But most of it is still in the hands of the Johnson boys
and girls or their sons and daughters.

After farming in Fisher County in the year of 1898, Papa moved to
a farm in Jones County, a mile northeast of Neinda, and farmed
there in 1899.  And there, in a half-dugout, my sister, Susie,
was born.

Many years later as we would drive by the farm in our hack, on
our way to church at Neinda, our parents would point out the old
dugout and explain, "There is where we used to live."  Year after
year as the old dugout deteriorated and began caving in, we still
went by it on our way to church and there was always something
fascinating about it to us kids as one or more of us would point
to the old dwelling and say, "There's where Mama and Papa used to
live."

During the two years my parents farmed away from their own farm,
they spent many days of hard work driving back and forth,
building a house, clearing some of the land, and building fences
on their land.  And of course they had to have a well drilled and
put up a windmill and water tank.

At the end of that two years, they took their two children and
moved into their new house on the first farm they had ever owned.
And Papa, with the aid of an efficient helpmate, continued to
improve the farm.  They built a big barn and shelters for cows,
hogs, horses, poultry, a hack, buggy, harness, and other things.
And the family continued to grow.  George was born in 1900 and a
daughter in 1901.  George lived 26 months and died with the
croup.  The daughter lived only two weeks.  Earl was born in 1902
and Joel in 1904.  This was the state of the family in 1906, the
year Grandpa died in his home, and the year I was born.  Aunts,
Uncles, and cousins lived on three sides of us, and Grandma lived
in the big house a quarter-mile north of us.

My parents were getting quite a collection of children by this
time.  And it is not always easy to find family hand-me-down
names for that many kids.  So by the time the seventh one arrived
they had to go outside the family for a name.  I don't know how
far out they went but they came back with what I have always
thought was a "far out" name, Clarence Edgar, and they pinned it
on me.  I was born January 11, 1906, in Jones County, West Texas,
in the middle of a large family.  Frank was eight years old when
I was born, Susie was seven, Earl three, and Joel 16 months.
There were three others born later, Albert, Ollie Mae, and
William Robert.  So, as you can see, my parents thrived and grew
rich--if you count children as wealth.  There were ten of us,
eight of whom attained full size and strength.

Five years after I was born, we moved to another farm about a
half-mile east.  Albert was born at the first place we lived and
William Robert was born at the second farm.  I know Ollie Mae was
born sometime in between those two boys, but I don't know where
she was born.  I'm sure it wasn't between the two farms.
Wherever it was, she became one of us and is still with us.

Mama told me that the $300 they paid Grandpa for the farm was the
hardest debt they ever had to pay off.

Money was hard to come by for a young couple just starting out.

Mama also told me all about how her family had moved from
Kentucky to Dallas County, Texas, then again to Grayson County,
then back to Kentucky, then again to Dallas County, and finally
to Oklahoma.

During all this time Mama's younger brother Hugh was trailing
along two years behind her.  They were seven and nine years old
when they moved back to their old home in Kentucky.  There were
200 acres in the farm, and these two kids had four years in which
to explore the meadows, the hills, the streams, and the
woodlands.  There were three springs of water, acres and acres of
wild berries, wild nuts, cherries, peaches, apples, and papaws.
There were many kinds of birds as well as coons and skunks.  And
for delicious food, there were swamp rabbits and opossums.

I was a young boy when Mama first told me that Hugh was her
favorite brother.  It didn't mean much to me at that time.  But
after I was a grown man, she told in detail how she and Hugh had
roamed together over the old farm during those four years, how
they had picked wild berries, and how they had carried them to
the store in Hodgensville and had sold them for ten cents a
gallon.

Emma's older sister and an older brother had long since married
and lived far away.  Henry was still at home but he was older
than Emma and too busy at other things to be interested in that
kid stuff.  No wonder Hugh was her favorite brother.  They had
played together, explored together, and had grown up together.

When I was young I heard Mama tell that her brother Hugh was shot
to death one day while out on his horse.  I didn't know whether
the Gaddies were living in Kentucky, Texas, or Oklahoma when he
got shot.  When I heard how Hugh had died, I was old enough to
know about Kentucky moonshiners, Texas cattle rustlers, and
Oklahoma desperadoes.  I wondered if any of them had played a
part in his death, but I didn't ask any questions .

Mama told me later that Hugh was a cowboy, had gotten his pay and
was riding home when a man shot him in the back and took his
money.

I was sorry I had ever wondered.

Mama told me that her brother Henry and the blacks around Duncan
were not very friendly toward each other.  At least one time, the
blacks held hands and formed a human chain across the road to
keep Henry from coming by.  But Henry whipped up his horses and
drove right through the crowd.  After that he carried a long
blacksnake whip to use on them if they ever got close to his
wagon again.

Part of the tradition that was handed down to us from the Gaddies
and the Johnsons was that there were only three things to drink--
water, sweet milk, and buttermilk.  You might include clabber if
you like.  But then, clabber was more of an "eat" than a drink.
Soda pop was for the wealthy and foolhardy, and coffee was not
permitted for three reasons:  it cost money, it was unnecessary
and it was not good for you.  Money was for necessities.  Any
drinks stronger than these mentioned were strictly forbidden.

Even the sound of the word "whiskey" carried with it an inkling
of sin and dishonor.  Whiskey without drunkenness was improbable,
and drunkenness was about as low as a person could go.

Mama grew up to hate whiskey because of its effect on men and
because it tasted bad.  However, there was always a jug of it
under her father's bed--for medical use only.  Any symptom of
disease was treated immediately with whiskey.  Mama hated the
taste of it.

Mama told us about a man--perhaps an uncle--who was sick in bed
and who was fond of whiskey.  As he lay in bed, a few friends and
kinfolks stopped by to see him.  And one by one he asked them to
mix him a little toddy.  They did.

And wouldn't you know it, five or six toddies all in one man at
one time made the man forget he was sick on disease and it made
him fairly sick on whiskey which was what he had planned to be.

After I came into the Johnson family, Mama's people lived so far
away I didn't get to know much about them.

We didn't get around to visiting them much.  But I remember we
did go to Duncan one time to visit some of them.  It seems that
the trip was made in about the year of 1916.  We went in our 1914
model Reo car.

I guess I was about ten years old.  I don't remember much about
the people we went to see, but I remember the white rabbits and
prairie dogs they had for pets.  They were running all over the
place.  I suppose it was Uncle Henry's place and I believe the
pets were Leo's, Uncle Henry's son.  Leo was perhaps four years
older than I was--maybe even more.

I think I met Mama's sister and her older brother, Will, a time
or two; I'm not sure.  But Henry was the only one of them I ever
really knew.

Henry and his wife, I think her name was Emma also, came to
Hamlin to visit Mama and Papa a couple of times after I was
married.  Then, when I was attending college in Arkansas, my
wife, Ima, and our youngest son, Larry, and I stopped by to visit
Uncle Henry two or three times.

During one of those visits, Uncle Henry went out into his garage
and took a book from the bottom of an old trunk.  The book was
similar to a ledger, about seven inches wide and ten inches long,
with a flexible cover.  In the book were 54 songs, handwritten
with pen and ink, most of them in my father's hand, a few written
by my mother.

It was my father's book which he had carried to parties and
singings while he lived in Oklahoma.  When he heard a song he
liked, he would write the words in his book of songs.  Other boys
and girls had their books of songs also, including Uncle Henry.

Uncle Henry also had a mother-in-law--or rather, I think it was
his mother-in-law-to-be--who gave him trouble at times.  One time
she got mad at him for some reason and burned his book of songs.
So Papa loaned Henry his song book.

Then the Johnsons moved away to Texas before Henry returned the
book.  When he was through with the book, Henry hesitated to make
a 400 mile round trip in a covered wagon just to return a
borrowed book.  So he didn't return it right away.  He put it
away for safekeeping.  It was forgotten until Henry mentioned it
during a visit to Texas to see Mama and Papa 50 years later

Mama was about 80 years old when Uncle Henry took the book from
the old trunk and asked me to take it to her.  Papa had died many
years before.

I have one copy of those songs and there is a copy of them filed
away at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

Neither the Johnsons nor the Gaddies had any part in the Oklahoma
land rush.  That took place in 1889, a few years before either
family arrived in Oklahoma.

I never once saw my Grandma Gaddie.  She passed away in Oklahoma
in 1912.  She suffered a sunstroke and died two weeks later.

Some years after that, Grandpa Gaddie came to live with us in
Texas.  I don't remember exactly when he came, but he passed away
while we were living on the Exum place, and we moved from there
in 1917.  He seemed quite old, maybe old ahead of his time
because of hard work and the severity of life at that time in our
history.

Anyhow, he could do light odd jobs about the farm.  There were
always outside chores to be done.  We kids were glad to have him
help us do them.  And he kept us kids company at times when there
was no work to be done.

But Grandpa was much more of a stranger to us than Grandma
Johnson was.  She lived only a half-mile away; we grew up with
her.  But I guess we hadn't seen Grandpa Gaddie more than once or
twice before he came to live with us.

Grandpa was never much of a bother in any way.  He was never
bedfast and never had to be waited on.  It didn't take much to
feed him.  We raised almost everything we ate and he brought
plenty of clothing with him when he came.  The entire family
didn't require much money, and we had plenty of other things in
life.

Grandpa was agreeable and compatible.  He was never grouchy.  He
had a room and a bed of his own in our home and he soon became
just one of the family and was accepted by all of us.

Then one morning Grandpa didn't come to breakfast.  A knock on
his door brought no answer.  Had he slipped out and gone for a
walk?  No one had noticed him out anywhere.  This was unusual for
Grandpa.  He was usually there on time for meals so the rest of
us wouldn't have to wait for him.  In our home no one ever
started helping his plate at meal time until all were seated and
the blessing was asked.

Papa knocked on Grandpa's door again, then he called to him, but
there was still no answer.  As Mama and Papa opened the door to
his room, there he was, still in bed, still asleep--but he was
not breathing.  It seemed that Grandpa just went to sleep and
didn't wake up.

Papa went to Hamlin that morning in a wagon and brought back a
casket.  The women dressed Grandpa in his best suit.  Some men
went to the graveyard and dug a grave.  Others went to tell the
preacher, and found him plowing in his field.  He stopped plowing
and went home to clean up and eat dinner.

Grandpa was placed in his casket and loaded into a wagon.  Then
about three o'clock we drove him to the Neinda graveyard where
the preacher and other friends were gathered.  And there, that
afternoon, we laid him away in his final resting place.

It's amazing sometimes, how a very little thing can stick in the
memory of a little boy, and that's the way it was this time, just
a simple little statement made by an older brother one morning--a
couple of mornings after we had buried Grandpa.  Four of us boys
slept in the west room of our home, the room usually referred to
as "the boys room."  We boys were getting out of bed and getting
dressed when Frank said, "Well, Grandpa's in heaven by now."
That was all he said.  That was enough.  After that, an air of
reverence filled the room.  And as we finished dressing, we left
the room one by one, in complete silence.  Frank had no way of
knowing how much I honored and respected him for that little
statement and the thought that went with it.  I was too young and
timid to know how to tell him.

That's about all of my childhood memories concerning the Gaddies.
In later years I had a desire to learn more about my mother's
people.  But as I began digging into census records, I soon found
that Grandma Gaddie had a first cousin by the name of Jesse
James-
-yes, that's right--"The" Jesse James.  So my desire suddenly
changed to fear and I gave up digging into records.




CHAPTER 2

EARLY CHILDHOOD AT THE FLINT FARM

The first farm we owned, the one where I was born, is still
spoken of as the Flint place, because we sold it to a family
named Flint.  So at times I may refer back to it as the Flint
place.

Since I was only five when we moved away from the Flint place, I
remember only a few things which took place while we lived there.

I remember we had old hens that laid eggs for us to go gather up
and take to the house in a bucket.  Sometimes the bucket would
get so heavy I couldn't carry it.  And sometimes we had to get
eggs out from under old setting hens that wouldn't get off their
nests.  They would peck me to keep me away.  I was too little to
get those eggs.  Mama or some of the bigger kids would have to
get them.

But if the old setting hen was off the nest, I knew which eggs to
get and which ones to leave in the nest.  The ones she was
setting on to hatch out little chickens were marked all over with
a lead pencil.  The ones that didn't have marks on them were
fresh eggs that had been laid that day.

Some city folks are confused at times about some of the words we
farmers use.  For instance, take the words sitting and setting.
The truth is, if an old hen is on an egg that she has just laid,
and if she is planning to go away in a minute or two, she is just
sitting on the egg.  But if she is on the egg or eggs with the
intention of hatching out little chickens, then she is not
sitting, she is setting.

Even some people who are supposed to be smart don't know farm
words.  In college English, the teacher had us making sentences
using certain double words like, "_Look up_ a word in the
dictionary."  And "_Hand over_ your gun."

I made a sentence like, "The cow wouldn't _give down_ her milk."

The teacher gave me a zero on the sentence.  And when I asked her
why, she said, "A cow can not _hold up_ her milk nor _give down_
her milk."

I told her, "Lady, you may know your English, but you sure don't
know milk cows."

Now back to the Flint farm.

I was so little that, when I would throw out corn and maize seed
to feed the chickens, I couldn't throw it far enough away from
me.  Some of it would fall at my feet.  So the big chickens would
crowd around my feet to pick up the grains and I was afraid of so
many big hens so close to me.  And I really got scared when they
started pecking the feed out of my feed bucket.  Sometimes I
would drop the bucket and run away.

I remember seeing Papa digging up big trees where he was going to
make a field.  It wasn't far from our house.  Sometimes I would
go take him a drink of water.  And sometimes Mama would send me
to tell Papa dinner was ready.

While Papa was drinking his water and resting a bit, I liked to
get down in the big hole he dug around the bottom of a big tree.
The dirt was damp and cool in the hole.  Some of the holes were
so big and deep it was hard for me to crawl back out.

Sometimes our old surley (bull) was close by and I was afraid of
him, so Mama would leave me at the house to watch after Albert
while she took Papa a drink.  But if the cows were way over in
the other side of the pasture, I wasn't afraid to go.

I remember our garden just outside our yard.  I was big enough to
pick fresh beans and peas.  The older ones in the family taught
me how to break the peas off the vines without breaking the
vines.  Mama could pick them so easily, with just the right twist
of her hands.  But I had to hold the vine with one hand while I
twisted the peas off with the other hand.

I had the smartest Mama.  She could do so many things, and she
could do them so easily.

I especially remember one little incident that took place in our
home when I was three.  Most of the things I remember from my
early childhood have been almost forgotten and I now remember
them through special effort and recall.  But this one brief
moment has lived with me and was never put aside to be recalled
later.

Mama was sitting in a chair in our living room.  Albert was in
her lap getting his natural milk breakfast.  I was in a hurry for
the baby to get through nursing so I could play with him down on
the floor.  In the meantime, I was standing leaning against Mama
and playing with the baby--playing with his hands and feet,
rubbing and patting his "tummy," and sometimes tickling him to
make him laugh.

Now all this activity caused a lot of wiggling and squirming in
Mama's lap.  And it also caused a lot of letting go of, and
getting back to, the baby's morning meal.  This kind of playing
with the baby might have aggravated some mothers and might have
brought a word of scorn, or at least an expression of impatient
dissatisfaction from them, but not from this mother.  She was one
of a kind.  She seemed to enjoy it all.  She was my Mama.

I was standing on Mama's left.  When Albert finished and was
full, Mama stood him down on the floor on her right.  And while
he was standing there holding to her dress for support, before
Mama put his breakfast away, back into her blouse, she looked
over at me and very motherly asked, "Now, do you want some of the
baby's milk?"

I didn't say a word.  I just bashfully backed away a step or so
and looked up at her and thought something like, "That's for the
baby, not for me."

For the first time in my life I was consciously aware of my
mother's love for me, in that brief moment, because of that
simple little gesture.  The poet expressed it better than I can,
when he wrote, ". . .the love of a mother for her son that
transcends all other affections of the soul."  I was deeply moved
by the thought that, although she had another little one to hold
closely and love and nourish, she had not pushed me aside.  Her
love included me too.

As the years went by, sometimes all seemed hopeless and I would
ask myself, "What the heck?  Who cares anyway?"  And always that
little three-year-old kid would give me the answer, "Mama does."

I remember the windmill by our garden and the water tank way up
high on the tower.  When the wind blew and the mill was pumping
water, we could open a faucet at the top of the well and get a
drink of fresh cold water.  We had a tin cup hanging on a nail on
the windmill tower to drink out of.  And we kept some water
hanging up on our back porch in a wooden water bucket made out of
cedar.  There was a dipper in the bucket that we all drank out
of.

Once when Papa was building his big barn at the Flint place,
before he got it finished, a strong wind hit it and leaned it way
over, but it didn't blow it all the way down.  Papa took a block
and tackle and got some men to help him and they pulled it back
up straight.

Our house had three rooms.  One of them was a kitchen and dining
room together.  There was a long porch at the front of the house
and an L-shaped porch on the back.  There were flower beds and
flowers in our front yard, and morning glory vines on the front
yard fence and china trees in the back yard.  They made good
shades to play in.

There was a hog pen on the north side of the barn, with sheds to
protect the hogs from the summer heat and the winter cold.  The
horse lots and cow lots were on the south side of the barn, with
sheds to shelter the stock.  Feed troughs were under the sheds
and feed was stored in the big barn.

I remember the hill west of the barn about a hundred yards.  It
wasn't a steep hill--just a gentle rise in the land.  But it was
high enough to get up on and see Uncle Andrew's house and
Grandma's house.  I couldn't see Grandma's house as good as I
could Uncle Andrew's because hers had so many big trees all
around it.

I remember we had a syrup mill too, up on the slope northwest of
the barn.  We had a horse that would go round and round and make
the big iron rollers squeeze the juice out of the cane stalks.
The juice would run down a spout and we would catch it in
buckets.  Then Mama would cook the juice in a big pan over a fire
out there in the pasture.

Of course Frank and Susie and Earl would all help keep the fire
going and help Papa keep putting cane stalks through the big
rollers.  Joel would help a little bit, but I was just in the
way.  And Albert had to be looked after too.

Sometimes the cows and horses would come and try to eat the cane
and we had to put them in pens by the barn.  When we finished
squeezing the juice out, we would let them all come out of the
pen and eat the stalks we didn't want any more.

When we got the juice cooked enough it was good ribbon cane syrup
and we would put it in big jugs and take it down in the cellar.
But not all of it.  We would take some of it in the kitchen to
eat.

I remember a big pile of wood and lots of mesquite posts.  They
were southwest of the barn on the slope of the hill.  The wind
had been blowing and lots of sand had drifted up in piles by the
woodpile.  Some of our plows and wagons were out there too by the
woodpile.  The posts were leaning up against big trees.

Just north of the hog pen was our stack lot with big stacks of
bundled feed in it.  And when I think of the stack lot, I think
of a little black horse we had named Keno, because all too often
Old Keno was in the stack lot without an invitation.  He was not
a big work horse, yet he could hold his own when hitched to a
cultivator.  And he could outdo all the others at acrobatics.

Yes, Old Keno was a fence jumper.  We often found him in the corn
patch or maize patch, what time he wasn't in the stack lot.
That's probably the reason I always remember him as being fat and
having a shiny coat; he got more than his share of goodies to
eat.

Anyway, one time I remember seeing Old Keno in the stack lot when
we were coming home from church or from Uncle Andrew's.  We drove
up from the west and as we came over the rise west of the barn,
there he was, in the stack lot again.

I really believe we were coming home from church because we were
all dressed up and were in our new hack.

We had an old buggy and I think we had an old hack.  I think I
sort of remember when we got the new hack.  The old one was good
enough for everyday use, and so was the old buggy.  But for
really stepping out in style, that shining black new hack was
something else.  For Sunday and for going to town, we used the
new one.  It had two seats, rubber tires, and a beautiful glossy
black finish--with tiny little yellow pinstripes at just the
right places.  When Papa hitched his two trotting horses to it,
it was truly a carriage to be proud of.

We also went socializing in the new hack.  And Papa never fooled
around with a walking team, they always trotted.  Even when we
drove 18 miles to Anson to visit the Hood family on Sundays, our
team trotted practically all the way.  And then they trotted back
the same day.

As I said, Old Keno was eating more than his share of the grain
from the bundles of feed, and he was wasting a lot also.

I was in the front seat with Papa and some of the other kids.  I
was probably in Papa's lap, I don't remember.  Mama was in the
back seat with some of the others.  In fact, Mama always rode in
the back seat.  There is no picture in my memory of Mama ever
riding in the front seat of our hack.  I don't really know why
she chose the back seat.  Fact is, it never occurred to me until
now that she may not have chosen the back seat; she may not have
had a choice.  While she was with us, it never entered my mind to
ask her why.  But now as I ponder these things, I wish I had.  If
she were sitting here in the room with me now, I would stop
writing long enough to look up and ask, "Mama, why did you always
sit in the back seat of our hack?"

And I haven't the slightest doubt that she would answer, "Why,
Willie and you children always rode in the front seat.  There
wasn't room for me."

Anyway, I was less than five years old, probably less than four.
And I don't remember what else Mama was doing, but I'll bet a
dollar she was holding Albert in her lap.  And I'll bet another
dollar I can guess what Albert was doing.  Since baby bottles
were almost unheard of in those days, and were not needed in our
family, he was probably getting his milk from some other source,
as mother nature meant for him to.

Be that as it may, Old Keno was eating at the feed stack and he
seemed to be much happier than Papa was to see him there.  I
don't remember what Papa said, if anything, but I do remember
that Mama expressed her disapproval of Old Keno's bad manners by
calling him a scoundrel.  That was the name Mama gave to
troublesome animals and mean people.

There was plenty of work to be done on the farm, and we kids
learned to work early in life.  Joel was just 16 months older
than I was, and one spring, when he was too young to go to
school, Papa had him planting in the field with a two-row
planter.  In the afternoons, when Earl got home from school, he
would relieve Joel, so Joel could go home and play the rest of
the day.

Then one day Joel got a foot hurt and couldn't run the planter.
So I had to take his place on the planter for a few days.
Planting had to go on.  I don't remember how old I was at that
time.  I do know for sure I was planting at the Flint place.  And
we moved from that place in January--the same January in which I
became five years old.  So, I must have been planting when I was
a little over four years old or when I was just past three, I'm
not sure which.  I am sure, however, I was older than two,
because, when I was only two, Earl was too young to go to school.

If it were not for skeptics, I could go ahead with my memoirs.
But I feel I should detour here and explain a thing or two, or
some folks will think I am lying.  One man has already questioned
my story about the two-row planter.  He thought they hadn't made
a two-row planter as early as 1910.  This one happened to be a
special type planter.  I have never seen but two of them in my
lifetime.

But you could be sure, if William Franklin Johnson heard of a
farm implement that he thought could be used to do a better job
on the farm, he would get it, if at all possible.  And if it
wouldn't do to suit him, he would make it do whatever he wanted
it to do.

I remember having seen Papa, as early as the Flint place, mind
you, using a combination cultivator-planter.  He could cultivate
his young feed or cotton and, at the same time, plant new seeds
in the skips where the first planting had not come up to a good
stand.

He built the implement himself.  That was ingenuity.  He was my
father.

This special two-row planter that I used was pulled by two big,
gentle horses.  They knew how to follow the furrows and stay on
the rows.  And they knew that "whoa" meant stop, even when a
three-year-old said it.  What's more, Papa was plowing along
beside me, just a few rows away, and he worked the lever and
turned my team around at both ends of the rows.

Now, that doesn't sound so far out, does it?

I'll bet the people around the little town of McCaulley would
believe me without an explanation.  They had a man in their
community who used a dog to do his plowing for him.  It's true.
And the man didn't have to be there to work the levers for him
and turn the team around at the end of the rows.

There were no rows.  He was flatbreaking his ground, going round
and round.  His mules followed the furrow all day long and the
man only had to sit there hour after hour doing nothing.  Then he
got the idea of tying his lines up and slipping off to the house
without his mules knowing he was gone.

This worked well except when the mules would stop once in awhile,
and he would have to go start them again.  So, next he put his
little dog on the plow seat.  The dog liked to ride so well that,
when the team would begin stopping, he would bark to keep them
going.

People could hardly believe their eyes--the very idea--a dog
plowing while his master sat on his porch in the shade.

Now, Papa didn't have a dog, so he used me.

We Texans have to be careful what we say and to whom we say it.
When I start talking with a man, the first thing I want to know
is, where is he from?

I know, Texans have a reputation of being big liars.  It is true,
all Texans are capable of lying, but they are not all liars.
They don't have to lie.  In Texas the truth is wild enough.

If I am talking with a man from north of the Mason-Dixon line, I
only have to tell the truth and he thinks I am telling a big
Texas lie.  But if the man is from Oklahoma, I sometimes have to
lie just a little to make the story interesting to him.  Those
Okies are almost as bad as Texans about story telling.

Some people think Texas is a state, but it's not.  Texas is a
state of mind, an attitude, a broad open expanse of freedom and
liberty known only to Texans.  It's a feeling you can never get
just by living in Texas, you've got to be born in Texas.

There are other happenings dating back to the Flint place.  Here
are a couple which took place before my time.  I can only relate
them to you as they were told to me.

We don't know where Frank got his first taste of chewing tobacco,
but he liked it and he wanted another taste.  It was only a half-
mile from our house over to Uncle Andrew's.  Now, Uncle Andrew
chewed tobacco and Frank knew it.  So, Frank found it easy to get
Mama to let him walk over there to play with Ruth.  He also found
it easy to ask Ruth if she knew where her dad kept his tobacco.

She knew all right, and she found it easy to "snitch" a chew for
Frank.  She also had the forethought to make sure she took enough
for both of them.  But, now that they had the tobacco in their
possession, it wouldn't be smart to risk being caught playing
around the house with tobacco in their mouths.

So, now Frank tells Aunt Mary he came over to see if Ruth could
come over to his house and play.  Yes, Aunt Mary would allow her
to go, which was a perfect set-up for five-year-old kids.  They
could chew the tobacco all the way from Ruth's house over to
Frank's house, just so they got rid of it before they got there.
Who cares how long it might take two little kids to walk a half
mile?  They could chew a long time.

However, one little problem developed.  The tobacco didn't affect
Frank at all, but before they got to Frank's house, Ruth was as
sick as a horse.

Naturally, they didn't dare tell why she was sick.  And she was
sure she would feel better in a little while.

Another little story came to me from Susie, my older sister.  She
was always having to see after the baby of the family.  At this
time Albert was the baby and I was about three years old.  She
probably had to take care of me also, when I was a baby.  But on
this particular day--the day of the snuff--Mama, Grandma, and I
went out to the garden.  Susie wanted to go but had to stay in
the house with Albert.

This was one of the few times during my childhood that I was just
the right size, and here I am, unable to remember a thing about
it.  Susie had to tell me about it.  If I had been any smaller, I
might have had to stay in the house with Susie and Albert.  And
if I had been any larger, I might have had to watch after Albert
while Susie went to the garden.

Anyway, Susie's brain was partly angry but mostly just idle, so
the devil used it for his workshop.

Grandma had put her snuffbox on the door casing above the kitchen
door.  Susie had never been allowed to taste snuff, but she
reasoned that it must be something special, because Grandma
"dipped" it all the time.

Many's the time Grandma would send me to the "branch" (creek) to
bring her a small hackberry limb for a tooth brush.  (It was
really a snuff brush.)  She would take a hackberry twig about
twice as big and twice as long as a wooden match and chew on one
end until it "frazzled" out into a bristle.  Then she would dip
the damp bristle into her snuff, put it in her mouth, and work
happily for hours, with the "brush" extending out one corner of
her mouth.

Now, this picture of contentment on Grandma's face as she dipped
and worked, is what the devil showed to Susie when he told her
she ought to climb up on the kitchen cabinet and get her some of
that delicious brown snuff in the little tin box.

She climbed up in a chair and got up on the cabinet, only to find
that she couldn't reach the snuff.  But she didn't give up.  She
climbed back down and put a chair up on the cabinet.  Then she
climbed up in the bottom chair to get onto the cabinet so she
could get up in the top chair.  And by leaning way over, she
could reach the snuffbox.

Now, Susie didn't want to climb down to dip her snuff.  It would
be too hard to have to climb all the way back up to put the snuff
back on the shelf over the door.  So she just sat down in the
upper chair and began dipping the snuff.

That's about all the story.  At least that's all she remembered.
She never did know how she got down from the chairs and the
cabinet.  She only remembers that, when she began to regain
consciousness, she was a mighty sick little girl, and snuff had
lost its charm and glitter.




CHAPTER 3

AT THE EXUM FARM AFTER I WAS FIVE

We, the Will Johnsons, owned this first farm 12 years.  Then in
the fall of 1910, Papa bought the Exum farm, just east of us.  It
was much larger and it fitted our needs better.  There were 332
acres in the place, and we paid $9,000 for it.

When January rolled around, it was time for us to move onto the
Exum place.  And on the day we moved that half-mile, I had to
stay at our old home.  I was allowed to help load the wagons at
our old farm, but they wouldn't let me go with them to our new
home to unload the wagons.  Of course, that hurt my feelings
terribly.

But I was hurt even worse when one of the older boys came running
back to the house to get a gun to kill a skunk down on the
creek--and Mama wouldn't let me go with him.

She said, "No, you can't go.  You're too little."

I didn't understand how Mama could be so mistaken in my size.  I
was as big as most of the other boys, I thought, and smarter than
some of them.

After we got moved to the new home, again Papa set out to build
whatever buildings we needed to suit our wants.  There was
already a house and a good size barn.  And when Papa finished
building, there were shelters for tools, livestock, poultry, and
a blacksmith shop.

He made a large, roomy cellar at our new home.  I can't remember
ever having to go to the cellar because of a storm, but it was
there just in case.  And it was good for storing fruits,
vegetables, and canned goods.

One time Papa brought home a stalk of bananas and hung it down in
the cellar.  Down there it would be protected from the heat of
the days and the freezing nights.  Papa explained to us that we
should eat the ripest bananas first before they got too ripe and
had to be thrown away.  Then some of the older kids jokingly told
that Papa said, "Eat the rotten ones first and wait till the
others rot to eat them."

We were poor in terms of money, yet we had as much as or more
than the average family in our community.  Papa was a carpenter,
a blacksmith, a good farmer.  And when automobiles came along, he
became a mechanic.

We never left our hack out in the weather, we had a shed to
shelter it.  Our barn was second to none in our neighborhood,
especially by the time we finished building sheds and stalls on
both sides of it.  Later on, we got a car and built a shed for
it.  We didn't call it a garage, it was a car shed.  And one time
Papa bought another house, moved it up beside ours, and joined
them together.

We had a good well of water, a big windmill, and a cypress water
tank on a tower about ten feet tall.  The tower under the tank
was boarded up on all four sides to form a room that was used for
keeping milk, butter, watermelons, and other things cool.
Screened windows allowed the wind to pass through.  That was
about the coolest place on the farm.

Next to the windmill was a garden, fenced rabbit proof and
irrigated with water from the well.  Every summer we had roasting
ears, popcorn, cantaloupes, watermelons, peanuts, okra, squash,
pumpkins, and more kinds of beans and peas than I can name.

The barn was filled with feed heads, corn, and cottonseed, both
for planting and for feeding.  There was room in the barn and
adjoining sheds for horses, cows, chickens and hogs.  And up in
the loft, there were peanuts still on the vines.

Some of our neighbors had given up trying to grow peanuts because
rabbits ate so many of the vines.  It was all but impossible to
keep the rabbits out of the patch.  But we always grew peanuts
anyway.  When neighbors asked Papa how he managed to grow so many
good peanuts, he told them he just planted enough for the rabbits
and the youngsters too.  I can't remember when we didn't have
enough peanuts in the barn loft to last all winter.  We stored
them on the vines and then we picked them off as we needed them,
and fed the vines to the stock.

I remember one sunny afternoon, four or five of us boys were
sitting up in the barn over the horse stalls eating peanuts.  I
was sitting on a board that was nailed to the underside of the
ceiling joists.  Well, the nails pulled out of the board and I
fell to the ground and hit my head on a wooden block.  The block
proved to be tougher than my head.  It cut a two-inch gash in my
scalp above my right ear.  Papa took me to our family doctor and
had it sewed up.

The story was told on us boys that, when we were all little, a
mule kicked one of us in the head, and that boy was never quite
normal after that.  But then, as we grew older, we all got to
acting so much alike that Mama and Papa couldn't tell which one
of us the mule had kicked.

Many years later, during the depression of the 1930s, a neighbor
was giving me a homemade haircut one Sunday afternoon and, when
he discovered the scar on my head, he laughed and said, "Now I
know which one the mule kicked."

Now let's get back to the story of when I was a boy on the Exum
farm.  I started to school when I was seven.  In fact, most kids
started at seven in those days.  And since I was seven when
school started in September, that meant I had been seven since
last January 11th.  In other words I was almost eight.

While we lived at the Exum place, we went to school at Wise
Chapel, which was about three miles northeast of our home.  In
winter we faced cold northers many mornings, and in the
afternoons, we often faced strong southwesterly winds on our way
home.

As we walked to school, other pupils from other farms joined us,
and then still others.  By the time we arrived at school, there
might be as many as 20 of us in one bunch.  One of the families
whose kids walked with us was the Bruner family.  Papa's younger
brother, Ed, married Eva Bruner.

What do you mean, "Did we walk that three miles to school?"

Of course we walked--except maybe two or three times a year when
the weather was extremely bad.

I might as well take time right here to mention another little
incident which took place along our school trail.  It involved
one of the Bruner boys.  And what happened to that boy should
never happen to anyone.  But when you get that many school kids
in one bunch, most anything is apt to happen, and it did this
time.

In the first place, I guess school trails shouldn't cut across
pastures, but they did.  In the second place, I haven't been able
to figure out why God made prickly pears, but He did.  In the
third place, if school kids are going to use the trails which
wind in and out among the thorny bushes and cactus plants, they
should never scuffle near prickly pears, but they did.  And in
the fourth place, if a boy scuffles and falls down, he should
never sit right flat down in a prickly pear, but he did.

After he got up, he went straight home.  His mother took the
tweezers and removed all the large thorns and many of the small
ones.  Then they took him to Mama because, they said, her eyes
were better.  She removed all she could see, which left the boy
in fairly good shape, I suppose, all things considered.

What we now know as kindergarten was unknown when I started to
school.  Beginners started in the Primer, and the Primer was not
a grade in school--it was a book.  As Webster defines it, "an
elementary book for teaching children to read."

We went to school to learn to read, write, spell, and work
arithmetic problems--and to obey the teacher.

We also learned many other things that were not a part of the
regular curriculum and which were not necessarily sanctioned by
those in authority.  We grouped them all together and called them
"recess."

In my first year, I went through the Primer, the first grade, and
far into the second grade.  I was almost ready for the third
grade at the beginning of my second year.  According to my
teacher and my parents, I was smart and well behaved.  I was a
good little boy.

Even at that early age, the teacher granted me special privileges
and I was in love with her.  My love and admiration for all
teachers, especially women teachers, went with me all through
high school and college, at times causing my wife some
displeasure.

During that first year in school, one side of my face became
paralyzed.  I was an ugly sight, especially when I laughed or
smiled.  Half of my face would smile and the other half would
just hang there, doing nothing.

The doctor prescribed some red medicine that Susie carried to
school every day and poured some down me ever-so-often.  It
tasted awful.  I was glad it was a beautiful red color.  I don't
believe I could have stood it if it had been brown.

Anyway, I slowly got over most of my ailment, but I'm sure it was
hard for my family to get rid of the horrible picture my
condition had printed on their memories.

Unfortunately, my paralysis was not my only ugliness.  I was born
with a "wen" in the corner of one eye next to my nose.  It was a
lump about the size of the end of my thumb--that of course,
depending on what age I was when you measured the end of my
thumb, and how much of my thumb you included in the measurement.
After all, how much of a thumb can you measure and still call it
the end.

At any rate, I was far from beautiful, even before the sagging of
half my face.

Not so with the rest of my family.  Papa was stately, superior in
quality, as generous as he was elegant, and he was a handsome
man.

Mama was a lovely woman.  I can remember back to when she was
about 33, and I can imagine how beautiful she must have looked to
Will Johnson 15 years earlier.  When I was very young, I liked to
watch her do her long hair up into one big plat, then coil it
round and round on top of her head and pin it so it wouldn't come
down.

Frank was handsome and admirable in the eyes of a younger brother
my age.  Susie was a good-looking girl.  However, all girls
looked good to me--as they were supposed to.  Earl's presence
would improve the looks of almost any group of kids.  And Joel
was downright pretty, that is, for a boy.  Although Albert and
William Robert were younger than I, and at times little more than
pesky little brothers, still I could easily see that they both
had something to be desired far above that which looked back at
me from my mirror.  And of course, Ollie Mae was as beautiful as
anything I had ever seen until I became 18 and fell in love.

The unsightly wen stayed with me until I was about 17--or
whenever it was I started shaving.  I couldn't bear the looks of
me in the mirror as I shaved.  So, one afternoon I drove over to
the Stamford Sanitarium and asked a doctor to remove it.  He got
me on the operating table and then asked me if I wanted him to
put me to sleep.

I told him, "No, I want to watch what you are going to do to me."

So he handed me a mirror and began whittling on me.  And when he
had finished the operation, he sewed me up, stuck a patch over
the place, and told me to let someone else drive me back to
Hamlin.  But since it was only 22 miles, and since I had driven
over there alone, and since there was no one to drive me back, I
drove myself back and I've been disobeying doctors ever since.

But, we're getting ahead of our story.  Let's get back to our
younger days when my little sister was about two years old and
she had two or three brothers who were not much older.  One of
those brothers noticed, as most little brothers do sooner or
later, that there was a difference in his and her ways of
draining water.

For example, when he had to go, he would merely stand behind a
tree or go around behind the smokehouse, let it flow and watch it
fall.  Or he might play fireman up the side of the smokehouse
wall.  Or maybe aim at a beetle or a red ant and watch him
struggle to survive.

On the other hand, his little sister would squat and her dress
would hide the entire operation.  But the day he became curious
about her method of operation and got nosy enough to peep to see
what was taking place, he committed the unpardonable sin.  And it
would have caused extreme pain in the region of the lower hind
part of that small boy if his mother had learned of what he had
done.  What she would have done to him would have been a big
price for a little boy to have to pay for a little knowledge that
most little boys get for free these days.  But he didn't get
caught.  That was the beginning of a lot of secret things that
little boy did throughout his childhood--secrets he didn't share
with anyone.

We four boys went out together most of the time, both to work and
to play.  But at the Exum place, Ollie Mae was getting big enough
to want to go with us when we went to play.  Her presence created
a little problem we boys hadn't had before, especially when there
wasn't a good hiding place.

I remember one day out in the pasture where there were no trees
or bushes to hide behind, one of the smaller boys had to drain
his water and he solved his problem in his own way.  He simply
said, "Ollie Mae, look the other way."  She did, then he turned
his back and minded his little business.

In the fall of the year, we often missed some schooling because
of so much cotton to be picked.  However, we didn't lose as much
time from school as some of the families around us.  Many a time
we would eat an early breakfast, go to the cotton patch and pick
for an hour or two and then go directly from there to school.  In
the afternoons we would go directly from school to the cotton
patch, pick cotton until dark and then go home for supper.

In my boyhood days, eating breakfast or supper in daylight was a
luxury many of us couldn't afford.  Cotton picking often went on
until spring and sometimes we'd have to lose a few days of
schooling in the spring in order to get the last of the cotton
out of the field in time for planting.

But our work was not always hard field work.  Sometimes there was
more pleasant work to be done, like going with Papa in the wagon
to haul a load of wood, or maybe to haul a hog over to a
neighbor's.

That kind of work was more or less dangerous when too many small
boys went along.  So some of us smaller ones would have to stay
home with Mama.

Papa always kept a box of sugar stick candy locked in the bottom
of his trunk for the purpose of bribing us smaller ones on those
occasions.  I really shouldn't call it bribery; rather, it was a
consolation offered to us younger ones who had to stay home.

When Papa would go somewhere alone in the wagon, it didn't hurt
us so much.  Mama would explain that he was going on a mission
where little boys were not supposed to go, and we would accept it
gracefully, since we all had to stay home.  But if one or two of
the boys rode away with him, that was hard for us smaller ones to
bear.

But we couldn't throw a fit, because fits were not allowed in our
family.  We just had to suffer the heartbreak in silence and a
fair amount of dignity.  And as they would drive away, it seems I
can still hear Mama saying to us, "Come on, children, let's go
get a stick of candy."  And of course, that would help our
feelings somewhat, bless our little hearts.

Sometimes the smaller children would each get a stick of candy
for staying home while the larger ones went down on the creek in
Grandma's pasture.  However, wading in water in our own pasture
after summer rain showers usually included all of us, the
youngest and all.  It was understood that the oldest of the bunch
was always the boss and had the responsibility for the safety and
well-being of the entire party.

Whether we were working or playing, that rule of command held
true in our family.  And it was not the only ironclad ruling in
the Johnson family--rulings which stood through the years without
question and with no thought of breaking.

We always had a set of four boxing gloves.  I say always because
I can't remember when we didn't have them.  And in boxing, we
obeyed the rules of not hitting in the face nor below the belt.
Another strict rule was, "Don't get mad at your opponent when he
is giving you a beating.  If you get mad, you mustn't play
anymore."  The same held true in wrestling.  If you couldn't
stand to be pinned down, you just didn't wrestle.

You can bet your boots, we all boxed and we all wrestled.  No one
wanted to be left out of the action.  And the only way to stay in
the action was to obey the rules and take whatever the other one
dished out.

This didn't mean that the big kids were unmerciful to the little
ones.  There was another rule, "Don't hurt the little ones.
Don't hold the little one down after he yells 'calf rope.'  Back
away and let him have a new start."

We all played "rough and rowdy," but always with smiles on our
faces.  And the rules of fair play applied to our animals also.

We had a big dog that was part Collie and part Shepherd.  He grew
up with us kids and became one of the family.  We named him
Scotch.  Papa brought him to us kids at the Exum place when he
was a wee, little woolly ball of bouncing, playful puppy.  Papa
had given five dollars for him, which was a lot of money for our
family in those days.  He was the only dog our family ever owned.

According to his bloodlines, he was half Collie and half
Shepherd, but according to us Johnson kids, he was just all dog--
a gentleman canine of the highest order, a true friend, guardian
and protector of children, truly a little boy's best friend.

We were taught never to abuse Old Scotch while he was a puppy,
and as he grew older, we couldn't abuse him, he wouldn't allow
it.  And we were told never to call him without a good reason,
such as to feed him, play with him or let him go hunting with us.
Papa told us that if the dog trusted us, he would obey us better.

I guess that was good advice.  At any rate, Old Scotch obeyed
orders and commands better and more promptly than any other dog I
have ever seen, either in or out of the movies.  He even obeyed
requests which were not meant as commands.

We kids didn't really know how to train the dog.  We just let him
grow up with us and by the time he was a year old, he was smarter
and better looking than most of us kids.

However, we did teach Old Scotch to do a few simple little
tricks-
-nothing spectacular.  He would sit down when we told him to.
And he would hold still while we placed a small stick on top of
his nose, and remain still until we counted to three.  Then at
the count of three, he would quickly flip it off his nose and
catch it in his mouth.  Then of course, he expected a pat of
congratulations and a kind word or two.

We taught him to keep the chickens off the porch and out of the
yard.  That was an easy job.  He soon learned to do it without
having to be told.

We kids liked to sit under the steering wheel of our car and
pretend we were driving.  Soon Old Scotch was doing the same
thing.  Sometimes when we kids opened the car door, we would have
to hurry or Old Scotch would beat us to the steering wheel.  He
was only playing with us kids when he did that.  He wouldn't do
Papa that way.

One of his favorite games was to take a stick in his mouth and
challenge us to a game of wolf-over-the-river.  He liked for us
to try to catch him and take the stick.  He also liked to play
catch--but only with a rubber ball.  We would pitch the ball to
him and he would catch it and return it to us.  However, there
was a strict rule in this game--never throw a hard ball to him,
because that would hurt his teeth and he would begin to distrust
and disobey us.

He learned not to trust some of the neighbor kids.  They
sometimes threw him a hard ball.  They didn't "Do unto Old Scotch
as they would have Old Scotch do unto them."

At times we would offer the dog something to eat that he had
never seen nor tasted before, and if he wasn't sure of it, he
might reject it.  But he seemed to have enough faith in us boys
to think that, if he could see us eat some of it, then he would
not be afraid to try it.  So, we would let him see us eat some of
it, or at least we would pretend to eat it.

Our dog didn't have the long Collie-like nose, but rather a
beautiful short nose like the Alaskan Husky.  Nor was his coat
long and stringy but was short and heavy, more like the wool of a
sheep before shearing.  His color was a deep reddish brown, with
just the right touches of white about the head.  His body was
round and full.  His shoulders and hips were broad, as though
somewhere in his ancestry there was most certainly a St. Bernard.

Old Scotch couldn't bear the sound of thunder.  During a
thunderstorm he wanted to go in the house and get under a bed.
That's the only time we ever let him in the house.  The noise
must have hurt his ears.  Firecrackers affected him the same way.
He would tolerate the noise of a rifle when he was out hunting
with us, but he wouldn't allow even his best friends to aim
anything at him.

Needless to say, we would never aim a gun at him any more than we
would aim one at each other.  But a broomstick or a hoe handle
was like a gun to Old Scotch.  When we aimed something at him, he
wouldn't bite us to really tear us apart, but he would certainly
bite hard enough to make us drop the object we were pointing at
him.  He would growl in a way that told us for sure that he would
not allow anyone to point anything at him.

Old Scotch saved us many a step and earned his keep many times
over.  We kept our milk-pen calves in the lot through the day.
Then we kept our milk cows in the lot at night and let the calves
run out to graze.  Next morning we would tell Old Scotch to go
get the calves and he would.  He wouldn't get the horses nor the
other cows--only the milk-pen calves.

After we ate breakfast and did the morning chores and were ready
to harness the horses for plowing, we would send Old Scotch after
the horses and he would get only the horses, no cows nor calves.
In the afternoon we would tell him to go get the milk cows and he
would bring only the cows, no horses.

When we called our dog, we didn't say, "Here, Scotch!  Here,
here, here."  The word we used wasn't "here," it was "how."  And
no matter how far away he was, he would come immediately when he
heard us call.  He only paused long enough to make sure it was
one of our family calling him and to get the direction from which
the call came.

And when he came to us, he didn't come walking nor trotting, but
loping.  And he didn't stop a few steps away nor lower his head
and ears, nor did he approach with his tail down.  He bounced
right up beside us, full of life and gusto as if to ask, "Oh boy!
What kind of excitement do you have planned for me this time?"

It's a common thing to see a two-car family in the 1970's, but we
were a two-car family as early as 1916.  We still had the Reo and
Papa bought a Big Six seven-passenger Buick touring car.  Old
Scotch knew that Buick by sound.  Uncle Robert had a Little Six
Buick that sounded almost like the Big Six.  Our dog could
recognize the sound of those Buicks a half-mile away.

When other cars drove by along the road, Old Scotch would pay no
attention to them.  We had taught him not to chase cars.  But
when either of those Buicks came along, he would run out to greet
it a quarter-mile away.  He also accepted Robert as a personal
friend as well as a friend to our family.

Then one day Old Scotch didn't come when we called him.  Nor did
he come the next day.  We had no idea where he had gone nor why.
Of course, we kept hoping that some day he would return.  But
days became weeks and weeks became months and the dog was still
missing.  By this time we had given up all hope of ever seeing
him again.

Papa and Mama taught us to be nice to our animals and taught us
how to get Old Scotch to obey us.  And there seemed to be no end
to the little things they taught us how to do.  In a jiffy they
could cut a slot in the side of a pumpkin leaf stem and make us a
horn to blow.  They showed us how to put a chicken's head under
his wing, swing him a few times and lay him down on the ground,
fast asleep.  Papa taught us how to tie a certain kind of a knot
in a rope for one occasion and another kind for another purpose.
And he taught us how to make a loop for roping calves.

We owed a lot to our parents for making our lives pleasant and
exciting.  They were among the most respected parents in our
community.  They were leaders--not in organizations concerned
with business or big government, nor in local clubs, but they
were upstanding church-goers with high standards of moral
character and integrity.  As in play, so in life, they wanted
their children to abide by a set of rules which would lead them
into a good life--a life of knowledge of the difference between
good and evil, with a desire to do the good and shun the evil.

They may not have thought of God as some of us do today but I am
sure they did what they thought was right, and they did it with
consistency and sincerity.  More than that we have no right to
ask.

Some families have their own little unique customs.  I suppose we
were one of those families.  When visiting with other families,
it seemed odd to me to hear them call their babies by their given
names.  We always called our youngest one "Baby" until the next
one arrived.  Then we called the new one "Baby" and the one
before him had to take on his rightful name.

This went on until my younger brother was born.  Joel, just older
than I, couldn't say Clarence, so he called me Big Baby and he
called the new one Baby.  No, he wasn't slow about learning to
talk.  You see, we didn't give him much time.  He was only
sixteen months old when I came along, and he was just three when
the new one came.  Another custom not common to all families was,
we smaller ones wore dresses around home for the first three or
four years of our lives.  It made diapering much easier and saved
a lot of laundering.  Come to think of it, I never heard of
diapers until I was almost grown.  They were not diapers, they
were breeches--in our family they were "britches."  That's the
only thing I ever heard them called until I was a mature man.

We were poor people, living the simple life.  I wasn't any poorer
than the rest of my family, but I was the simplest one.

We also had this custom of competing among ourselves.  In most
everything we did, there was an element of competition and hurry.
Our parents had a way of causing us kids to apply pressure to
each other.  They found that it worked better than when parents
tried to force kids to work faster.

In the cotton patch you could hear us kids saying such things as,
"I picked more cotton than you did."  Or if we were hoeing you
might hear something like, "Come on, Slow Poke."

The plan worked well.  No one wanted to be outdone by a brother,
especially a little brother.  And if a little brother could
outshine a big brother, even just once in awhile, that was a real
feather in the little one's cap.

Oh, yes!  There was hurry and there was pressure.  But it didn't
seem to get us down as it does some people today.  We had no
psychologists in those days to tell us that pressures would warp
a kid's brain.  We didn't know that competition and hurry would
drive us crazy until these educated people told us about it.

So we lived hard, we worked hard, and we played hard.  Then we
were able to go to bed and sleep hard.  Never in my life did I
ever hear Mama or Papa say, "I didn't sleep well last night,
because I felt tense and worried."

There was really nothing to worry about like there is today.
They didn't worry that we kids might go away from home and get
into trouble.  We didn't have to leave home to get into trouble.
We kids made our own trouble right at home.  We had a lot of fun
doing a lot of different things.  Most of our troubles were
brought on accidentally, we didn't deliberately plan them.

There was no worry about the family losing anything, we had
nothing to lose.  No one would steal from us because no one
wanted what we had.  So, whatever pressures we might encounter
during the day were dispelled during a night of welcome rest.

In the cotton patch Mama and Papa encouraged us to see who could
pick 100 bolls first.  The first one to pick his 100 bolls would
call out, "hundred."  Then each of the others would call out the
number of bolls they had picked during the same time.

This competition got more bales of cotton to the gin in a shorter
period of time.  But, as in all activities where kids are
involved, we sometimes had little disagreements.

I had this thing of humming or singing a song while I picked
cotton and counted my bolls.  I found that the mental work I was
doing was relaxing and it allowed my hands to do their work
faster.  And now, 65 years later, I learn that I was doing
something a little bit kin to what they call Yoga.

At any rate, it really worked for me.  I could pick cotton faster
than a brother or two who were older than I was.  Now, I didn't
necessarily use my system in order to get more of the family
cotton picked.  I used it mainly just to beat my older brothers
picking cotton, and that not for very long at a time.

But my little scheme backfired on me.  One of those brothers
couldn't stand to be outdone by a younger brother.  He told Mama
and Papa that I was lying and cheating, because he knew I
couldn't count bolls while I sang a song.  But he was wrong.  I
could.  Anyway, nothing I could say would make him believe me.  I
began to become an outcast among some of my brothers early in
life.  I believe there were times when some of them would have
been glad to "sell me into slavery" as Joseph's brothers did him.

But my parents didn't seem to doubt my word.  I really believe
they understood that I could do a thing or two that some of the
others could not do--and perhaps were not at all interested in
doing.

I believe little things like that were the beginning of a wee bit
of an unconscious rift between some of my brothers and me, and at
the same time, the making of a stronger bond between my parents
and me.

Looking back, I remember many times when Papa and I were doing
things together and there was no one else around.  I really don't
know why I was the only one there a lot of times.  Maybe I just
wanted to be in good company.  I loved and admired Papa and I
thought he was the best and nicest man in the world.  Or perhaps
I was with Papa because of my inquisitive mind concerning
mechanical things, like,

"How do you shoe a horse?"

"How do you tighten a loose wagon tire?"

"How do you make a row-binder do what you want it to do when the
manufacturer couldn't seem to do it?"

I watched him do all these things and many more.  And many of the
things he did fascinated me.

The situation was much the same between Mama and me.

"How do you churn milk and make butter?"

"How do you 'take up' the butter after it is churned?"

"How do you make those beautiful decorations on it later?"

"How do you weave a carpet on Grandma's loom?"

It seems I was always watching a lot of these goings-on while the
other kids were somewhere else doing whatever they liked to do.
And Mama and Papa were never too busy to answer my questions.  I
realize now how much more I could have learned if I had only
known how and when to ask more questions.

It seems that my parents favored and petted me at times.  I'm not
sure they did.  If they did, perhaps it was because they felt
sorry for their little ugly duckling.  And maybe I only imagined
they were especially nice to me.  Maybe they were that nice to
everyone.  Perhaps they were nice to me just to have me around
handy when they needed me to help them just a little bit.

This latter seems to be the most reasonable argument, after
considering some of my stupid exploits and my senseless reasoning
throughout my life.

Yet, it just might be possible that they were partial to me on
account of the wen, and later on, my paralysis--these factors
coupled with the fact that within the last four years along about
the time I was born, they had suffered the loss of a two-year-old
son, a two-week-old daughter, Mama's favorite brother, Hugh, and
Grandpa Johnson.

Who can measure the thoughts of loving parents as they view their
newborn child for the first time, anxious to know whether he or
she is beautiful and healthy and without blemish.

And who knows the anxiety of parents who, after seeing their
child with blemish, must wonder how his condition will affect his
relationship with others, how it will affect his outlook on life,
and whether it might grow worse and shorten his days.




CHAPTER 4

SOCIAL LIVING; LOVING, LISTENING, LEARNING

There were so many little stories unfolding simultaneously that I
am going to be unable to keep them all up to date as I go along.
While I have been telling about some of our working habits and
our little family customs, I find that the story of my love life
has been neglected.  I must go back a way now and bring some of
my social living up to date.

Oh, yes!  I had a sweetheart.  Her name was Gladys, and I must
tell you about her.

You see, when we moved to the Exum farm, I was a little boy
barely five years old.  But then, when we had lived there a year
and a half, I was no longer just a little kid.  I was getting to
be a big boy, six and a half and going on seven.  And my ears
were getting bigger also.  I began to hear about sweethearts.
Susie was thirteen and was just the very one to explain it to me.

She told me once, jokingly, "A sweetheart is a chicken heart
baked in molasses."

But seriously, what she explained about sweethearts amounted to
something like this, "Sweethearts are one boy and one girl about
the same age who like each other and like to go together and like
to do things together.  He is her sweetheart and she is his
sweetheart."

Now the Flints, who had moved onto our old farm, had a bunch of
boys and girls and we all played together.  The one I liked best
was Gladys.  She was just my size, she was six years old, and she
and I liked to go play together.  So, when I learned what
sweethearts were, I knew for a fact that Gladys was my sweetheart
because we liked each other and played together.

Of course, I didn't tell anyone, not even Gladys.  I didn't feel
any differently toward her.  We just went right on playing
together as we had been doing.  But I had this newly acquired
knowledge that she was my sweetheart.

No more than I knew or could understand about it all, I wondered
why boys and girls had sweethearts at all.  They were just like
other boys and girls except they were your own age.

I never heard of any parents who objected to their older boys and
girls having sweethearts and dating.  (In those days we called it
"going together.") But in our immediate community, there were
some pretty strict rules to govern their behavior.

The "good" people in our community didn't allow their boys and
girls to dance.  So, there were no dances in our neighborhood
because there were no families that wanted to be branded as being
"not so good."  Instead of dances we had parties.  Many a Friday
night some good farm couple would give a party.  These parties
were always family affairs.  The young people didn't go to the
parties alone.  Their parents took them to the parties and then
the grown-ups took part in many of the games.

I remember two of the games they played.  They were "snap" and
"cross questions and crooked answers."  There were many others
but I can't recall them just now.  I was only eleven when we
moved out of that community, and we never had such parties at any
place we lived after that.

One night at one of the parties, Frank's girl "snapped" me.  (We
didn't call them girl-friends as we do today, just "Girls.") But
I was so timid I just backed away like the bashful country kid
that I was.  She told them she got "stood-up" and would have to
pick someone else.

I wanted to play in the games, but I realized that I was much
smaller than any of the others who took part in them, and I was
afraid I might do something wrong and cause them to laugh at me.

Two of the party song-and-dance "swings" they did were "Shoot the
Buffalo" and "Farmer by the Mill."  These were the promenade type
dances where they swung their partners kind of like in a square
dance.  Mr. Flint was about the best man in the neighborhood at
calling those dances.

Now I have gone and contradicted myself.  I first said we didn't
have dances.  Now I'm telling you we danced.  But this was not
the kind of dance where they waltzed around in each other's arms.
They were party dances.

When the party activities got under way, the people were seated
all around the room next to the walls.  Usually some were
standing in the adjoining rooms also, looking through the doors,
because the living room wasn't large enough to hold the crowd.
When that many came to a party, it was considered a good party.

A large crowd was just what they wanted.  More people meant more
games and more happy people playing games.  In general, when
there was a large crowd, things moved along at a faster pace.

The game of "snap" was usually played by the young set--that is,
the sweetheart set who enjoyed holding hands and chasing after
each other.

The game was easy to get started.  All it took was a girl and a
boy to stand in the middle of the room and hold hands, facing
each other.  Then the girls would "volunteer" one of their crowd
and push her forward to be "it."  Then the "it" girl would circle
the room looking for the boy she wanted for a partner.  When she
found him, she would snap her fingers in front of his face, just
as you would in school when you wanted to get the teacher's
attention.

This snap told the boy that he was her chosen, at least for a few
minutes.  As soon as she snapped her fingers, she would hurry to
the couple in the middle of the room and the boy she "snapped"
would chase after her.  His object was to touch the girl, and her
object was to try to prevent his touching her.

She would try to prolong the chase by dodging and sometimes
swinging around the couple in the center of the room.  And
sometimes the couple would prolong the chase by favoring the
girl.  They might raise their arms to let the girl go through
between them and then lower their arms quickly to stop the boy.
Or, if the boy was having a hard time catching her, they might
let her start through between them and then lower their arms
quickly and trap her in their arms.

As soon as the boy touched the girl, the chase was ended.  Then
the couple who had held hands would leave and let the new couple
hold hands in the center of the room while another chase took
place.

This was not only a holding-hands game, at times it became a
body-
contact game.  And yet, not too much contact, because the grown-
ups were watching.  Anyway, snap was a popular game at our
parties.

Now, this Friday night the party might be at the Johnsons, but
before the party was over, you could bet good money that the
teen-
agers would have talked another family into giving a party next
Friday night.

These were strictly play parties.  There were no refreshments
served, not a lot of cooking and fixing.  Just make sure the
house is clean, the yard is clean, and there are plenty of places
to park buggies, hacks, and wagons.  Then hope a big crowd begins
gathering soon after sundown.

Parties were preferred over dances because it was considered
immoral for a boy to put his arm around a girl before they were
married.  Sweethearts could hold hands in the presence of adults,
if it were in the process of playing a game.  But just to sit
this one out and hold hands was unthinkable.

A "good" mother would never tell her daughter it was all right
for her to hold hands in public, or to hug and kiss anywhere, on
her way to church or anywhere else, either afoot or in a buggy--
not even at night.

Somehow, I just can't help but believe that parents knew these
little things were going on between lovers, but they seemed to
think that if they told their kids it was all right for them to
do these things, it would be like saying "sic 'em" to a dog.
Putting it another way, parents were saying, "Don't ever let me
catch you doing such things."  And the kids were not actually
saying but were thinking, "Okay, I'll try not to let you catch me
when I do them."

Dances were looked down upon because they attracted boys who
drank, and girls with loose morals.  There were some boys and
girls who lived six or eight miles from us who were not wanted at
some of the parties given in our neighborhood, and were not
invited by some of our neighbors who were giving the parties.

But when my parents gave a party at our house, they invited
everyone who would come.  They thought it unmannerly to invite
certain ones and leave others out.  They seemed to figure that
their integrity would demand respect from the worst of them--and
it did.  There never was any trouble at our house--no drinking,
no fighting, no "cussing."

I remember one of those parties when some young people came in a
buggy from quite a distance away.  I think I was about nine years
old and, of course, I didn't know all about everything that went
on around me but I knew enough to realize there were some bad
feelings between their families and some of those in our
immediate neighborhood.  The main reason seemed to be that those
youngsters attended dances in other communities and some parents
in our neighborhood sure didn't approve of that.

The incident I remember had to do with their buggy horse which
got sick with a severe attack of colic while the party was going
on.  Someone had wandered outside and had discovered the horse in
great pain.  The boy who owned the animal had seen the disease
before and knew how quickly it could kill a good horse.  So he
offered to sell the animal to anyone for $10.  It would have been
a bargain for Papa, because he knew exactly what to do to cure
the horse.  And the horse was probably worth $50.

When Papa learned about the problem, he got a quart bottle,
filled it about a quarter-full of soda and then added about a
half-quart of kerosene.  Then he climbed up in a tree, pulled the
horse's head high in the air with the bridle reins and poured the
mixture down his throat.  Within ten minutes, the horse was
without pain and resting comfortably, except for a mighty bad
taste in his mouth.

I think the boy was truly grateful that Papa had not taken
advantage of him by buying the horse.  Will Johnson knew that a
good name was rather to be chosen than the value of a buggy
horse.

Along with sweethearts, there were a few other things I didn't
understand altogether.  One time during my younger days, I cut
out a picture of a baby buggy from a Sears, Roebuck catalog.  I
don't remember just how old I was at the time.  I was old enough
to do a pretty good job of cutting out, but I didn't do so well
with my reasoning.  I was disappointed to learn that the buggy
wouldn't sit up and roll.

That was not altogether a case of stupidity but rather, a lack of
research.  This was part of the research through which I learned
about the third dimension.

It's hard to believe a kid that stupid could become so smart
within the next few years and retain that smartness for the rest
of his life.

We also learned--not through research, but from concerned
parents, about the choice of words to use, the careful choice, I
might add.

Some words were strictly forbidden.  The word "bull" was one of
them.  We didn't dare use that word in the presence of Papa or
Mama.  And if any of the other kids heard us use it, they would
tattle on us.  So, we just didn't use it.  We were taught to use
the word "surley" instead.

As late as 1940 I knew middle-aged men who would not use the word
"bull" before a woman.  One old farmer said, "I don't know what
the world is coming to.  I believe the time will come when men
and women will use the word 'bull' in mixed company and think
nothing of it."

But that was in farming country.  In cattle country it was
different.  I'll bet a ranch boy wouldn't have known what a
surley was.  One of my rancher uncles was talking to a farmer who
had some calves he wanted to sell to the rancher.  He told the
rancher, "Three of those calves are still nursing."  Well, my
uncle and his daughter had to put forth an effort to hold back
their laughter.  They were not used to nursing calves.  In cattle
country calves don't nurse, they suck.

Continuing along that same line, up until I was a teenager, I
never heard the words "sex" or "male" or "female" used except by
some dirty-mouthed kid.  Even when I was in the seventh and
eighth grades, when I had to fill out certain school papers and
was told to put an M for male or an F for female, there was a wee
bit of embarrassment or shyness associated with the use of gender
words.  The use of the word "sex" was still guarded against,
except in writing.  The word was never spoken in mixed company.
The word "gender" was considered bad enough.

And speaking of dirty-mouthed kids--no one in our family ever
used any kind of dirty words, at least not in my presence.  Some
of the brothers I grew up with are in their seventies now and I
can truthfully say, I can not recall ever having heard one of
them "cuss" nor utter a dirty word.

We have all heard of that proverbial corner around which
prosperity is lurking.  Well, at the Exum place we finally
rounded that corner and bumped right into it.  We got a
telephone.

I'm sure we didn't have a telephone at the Flint place.  But by
about the time I started to school, almost everyone in our
neighborhood had one.  There were maybe eight or ten parties on
the same line.

We owned our own telephone, put up our own lines, and bought our
own batteries.  Having so many on one line wasn't the best
arrangement but it was better than no phone at all.  It was a big
step forward at that time in the history of our community.

Every day at noon--straight up twelve o'clock--the operator would
ring a long, long ring.  We could set our clocks by it and we
could listen to the weather forecast immediately after the long
ring.  I don't know where they got the weather information,
probably from a record of what the weather did on that same day a
year ago, or maybe from the almanac.  Anyway, wherever they got
it, most of us listened to it and were stuck with it.

In the above paragraph I said the operator would ring.  That's
not exactly right.  It's true, she was a woman operator.  And we
kids knew she was a woman, but we didn't know she was an
operator.  We only knew her as "Central."  As far as we were
concerned, her name might just as well have been Mrs. Central.

At any rate, when we wanted to ring someone on our line, out our
direction from "Central," all we had to do was turn the crank and
ring their ring.  For instance, our ring was a long and four
shorts.  But, if we wanted to talk to someone on a line out
another direction from Hamlin, we had to ring a long ring to get
"Central" and get her to connect our line to the other line.
Then she would ring that party for us.

When any of us tried and tried to ring Central and couldn't get
her to answer, naturally all the phones on our line would be
ringing at the same time, and usually some neighbor on our line
would volunteer to ring for us and help us get through to
Central.  Perhaps the neighbor's phone had a stronger magneto, or
perhaps two or three of us ringing at the same time might send a
stronger current and get through to her.  We tried everything.

Come to think of it, there was the possibility that Central's
phone had been ringing from the beginning.  It was just barely
possible that she was eating a sandwich in another room.  And of
course, we shouldn't overlook the possibility that she might have
been out in the little house backed up to the alley.

Speaking of getting through to the operator, let me tell you
about one day when the operator got through to me.  Now, on this
particular day, Frank was the operator.  He was in command.

Frank, Earl, Joel and I were hoeing cotton.  Frank, being the
oldest and the one who would have to answer to Papa if the work
didn't get done, was working hard and was way out ahead of the
rest of us.  I was the youngest and least and was way behind, but
not too far behind to be able to talk to Earl and Joel.

After awhile Frank looked back and found us doing a lot of
standing and talking and not much working.  He shouted to us to
get to work.  We did for awhile because we knew Frank was boss.
But again we got to talking more than hoeing and Frank yelled
again, "Get to work back there!"

Now, I know it was hard on Frank, he being the oldest and having
all the responsibility for getting the hoeing done.  It was hard
on me too, just being the youngest with no responsibility.

Finally Frank got so far ahead that it seemed not so necessary to
obey him.  Some of us read the Bible with that same attitude.  We
seem to think that God has gone so far away we need not obey him
any more.  But I suppose God knows when we are loafing and
getting further behind, just as Frank knew about us boys that
day.  Anyway, we got more and more lax and Frank got more and
more tense.  Then he shouted again.  "Get to work back there!"

Earl looked at me and said, "Tell him to come and make you."

Now, Earl always was one to recommend that someone else do
something he wouldn't do for anything.  But Earl also knew me and
he was reasonably sure I would do it.  That would leave him
guiltless and he would get to see the fun.  His pleasure would be
twofold.  He would glory in the thought that he had caused me to
do something that we both knew I shouldn't do and he would enjoy
seeing me get a good licking which he knew I had needed many
times more than I had gotten.

At the same time, I was eager to show off and furnish
entertainment for my "fans."  So, I shouted back, "Come and make
me!"

And Frank did just that.

I knew what was coming long before he got to me.  I knew it would
hurt and I knew I deserved every bit of it.  But it was funny--in
a way.

By the time Frank got to me I was flat on my back with my feet
toward him.  I kicked furiously.  My laughing hindered me
somewhat but I managed to keep him at bay for awhile.

My feet were flying and aimed in his direction.  He circled
around me, trying to get at my weaker end--my head.  After two or
three rounds, he got me, and I got what was coming to me.

I was so tickled, it didn't seem to hurt at first.  But the more
I laughed the harder he whipped me.  If I remember right, I think
I quit laughing before he quit whipping.  Anyway, I had my fun
and my punishment, Earl and Joel saw a good show and Frank did
what he had to do.  And I worked harder after that.

Do you think I told Mama and Papa what Frank did to me?  Of
course not.  That would have brought a reprimand from them.  I
knew I had done wrong.  I also knew I had better let well enough
alone.

And did Frank tell them I had been a bad boy?  Certainly not.  He
had handled the situation well and we all knew he could do it
again next time.  That's the way our family discipline worked.

There were a lot of disadvantages to being little when I was
growing up.  I don't mean like the whipping I got from Frank.
That was okay.  I needed that.  I mean like things I wanted to
do.  There were so many things I wanted to do that Mama and Papa
wouldn't let me do.  They would say, "You're too little."

With Earl and Joel, it was different.  They were not too little--
never had been.  At least, if they had been, I couldn't remember
it.

One thing I wanted to do was go hunting with Uncle Robert and his
greyhounds.  I remember I went one time, but most of the times I
was too little.  I had to stay home and hear them tell about the
rabbit hunt afterwards.

I guess the time they let me go was when they weren't going very
far and they figured I could keep up with the others for awhile.

Anyway, Robert had some dogs that were mighty fast and well
matched.  It was hard for a jack rabbit to get away from them.
Old Queen was his fastest one.  She was his lead dog.  Old Pluto
was almost as fast.  He would run in single file behind Old
Queen, and when a rabbit began to circle, Old Pluto would begin
to cut the corner to keep the rabbit going straight.

A rabbit likes to circle back to his home territory.  He knows
the lay of the land at home and figures he has a better chance to
survive.  But Robert's dogs wouldn't let him circle back.  That
seemed to frustrate him and make him easier to catch.

Robert also had about three other running dogs.  They were not
quite as fast as Queen and Pluto but they played important roles
in the pack.  They were good to spread out and help flush rabbits
out of the weeds and brush.  And they were also there at the end
of the chase to catch the rabbit in case he dodged quickly and
the two leading dogs failed to catch him.

When those dogs jumped a jack rabbit, you could just about write
him off as another dead rabbit.  About the only way a rabbit
could escape was to run into a patch of tall, thick feed where
the dogs couldn't see him.

Other men wanted to buy Robert's dogs at times but he took pride
in owning the best greyhounds for miles around, and his best ones
were not for sale.

Uncle Robert was a favorite of us boys.  He was Papa's youngest
brother and was only eight years older than Frank.  We liked just
about everything about him, especially the way he paid us when we
worked for him.  When we hoed or picked cotton for him, he paid
us as soon as we were through, and he paid us in cash, never by
check.  We hated checks.  Some men paid us boys by check, with
all our wages figured in together, usually along with Papa's.
Then we had to wait for Papa to go to town and get the money,
which might be as much as a week later.

But not so with Uncle Robert.  When time came for him to pay us
boys--as soon as the job was finished--he made it a point to have
a pocket full of coins so he could pay us then and there.  There
was no piece of paper, no writing and no waiting.  And he paid
each of us separately.

Another thing I was too little to do was go upstairs at
Grandma's.  Yet, I didn't mind that so much because I wasn't the
only one.  Even Earl and Joel couldn't go up there.

Robert and Ed were still living at home and not married.  Their
rooms were upstairs and they didn't want us little kids messing
around up there.  Besides, there was danger we might fall on the
steps and get hurt.

I didn't know at the time why they didn't want us to go upstairs.
They didn't tell us the truth about it.  What they told us was,
"If you go up there, the Old Bootjack will get you."  Well, I was
almost grown before I learned what a bootjack was.  Then it was
easy to see that a bootjack wouldn't hurt anyone, especially
little kids.  But the fear of it served its purpose.  And I
suppose we were not mentally warped because of having been fibbed
to.

We learned other lessons also--some the expensive way.  I
remember, some of us Johnson kids were at Uncle John Hudson's
house one day, playing with all his kids, when we discovered a
pig out of his pen.

Now, Uncle John was away from home at that time and we thought we
should do him a big favor and get his pig back in the pen with
its mama.  I don't know why, he couldn't hurt anything, he was
too small.  But he had a pen and we kids thought a pig ought to
be in his pen.  So we got after him.

It was a hot day.  In fact, it was so hot that the sandy ground
burned our bare feet.  We were suffering from the heat but we
thought we must not stop until we caught him.  We felt duty bound
to get that pig back in his pen.

We chased him all over the place and finally caught him out in
the peach orchard.  Well, we were hot, the ground was hot, the
weather was hot, but most of all, that little pig was hot.

We carried our little prisoner and we all got under the shade of
a peach tree.  We kids cooled off right away, but the pig was so
tired and was breathing so fast, we thought we ought to cool him
off with some cool water.

We carried water from the windmill--good, cool water right out of
the well.  Then we poured it on the little pig--and he was dead
in about one minute flat.

We were sorry, but how were we to know that cold water would kill
a hot pig?  No one had ever told us it would.  We learned that
lesson the hard way--that is, hard on Uncle John.  And we learned
some other things too, when he learned about his pig.  Oh yes, he
told us a few things he wanted us to know.

Regardless of all the little mistakes we kids made, we generally
had the run of the farm at our Exum place, except for a few
things which were not allowed.  One of these was, "Don't climb on
the feed stacks."  That would destroy a lot of the feed and allow
rainwater to run in and ruin even more of it.  No problem there.
Most any kid could follow that line of reasoning.  But another
"Don't" that was not so easily understood was, "Don't play in the
cottonseed."

What could it hurt to play in it?  It was in a nice bin, and we
would leave it in the bin.  Walking on it wouldn't hurt it.
Digging holes and tunnels in it wouldn't damage the seed.  This
was forbidden fruit we just couldn't understand.

So, the rule about not playing in the cottonseed had its effect
on cultivating our dishonesty.  It was so much fun, we went ahead
and played in the cottonseed bin anyway, when we thought the
coast was clear.  And I can't remember ever having gotten caught
at it.

I can understand it all now.  If we had been allowed to play in
the cottonseed, we might have gotten careless about wasting seed
out the door when we were having a cottonseed fight.  And, more
than likely, we would have left the door open at times for the
rain and rats and cows to get in.  And of course, a cave-in in
one of our tunnels might have trapped one of the smaller kids
when there were no large ones around for rescue work.  We hadn't
thought of that.

But we couldn't understand it at that time, and it seemed to us
that this cottonseed "don't" was not an absolute "don't," but
perhaps more of an "I don't think you ought to" kind of a
"don't."  So, when viewed from that angle, we didn't feel so
guilty.  We just played in the seed and enjoyed it.

But since there was at least a half-hearted rule against playing
in the cottonseed, we didn't dare leave the door open when we
were playing inside.  Papa could have spotted that open door a
quarter-mile away and, come supper time, we kids would have had
to answer a question or two.  Also, a few seeds outside on the
ground could have been seen by conservative parents or maybe by a
brother who was bent on "getting even" with another brother, and
at the same time, putting a fresh shine on his little halo by
tattling.

In spite of all the drawbacks, we played in the cottonseed, and
naturally we stirred up dust.  And when the sun shone through the
cracks onto that dust, it was hard to see through it--it was sort
of like a wall that you could walk right through.

One day we were playing in the seed when the sun was shining
through a horizontal crack in the boards.  The dust in the
sunshine looked a lot like a large board, lying flat above the
seed.  I tried to crawl up on the dust as though it were a table
top.  But of course, it wouldn't hold me up.

I couldn't understand it.  So I stirred up more dust until it
became very dense.  Then I tried jumping up on it.  But it still
wouldn't hold me up.

Years later, I learned why.  The dust wasn't as dense as I was.

I have told you about a three or four-year-old boy planting with
a two-row planter, a dog plowing for his master, and Texas kids
trying to walk on dust clouds.  Don't go away, I have other true
stories to tell you.

As I mentioned before, I have heard Papa tell of trail driving
near San Angelo, Texas.  He was just a lad at that time--couldn't
have been more than 17 or 18 years old.  Here is what he told me
about 35 years later:

One time when they were on the trail, they had bedded their
cattle down one night near San Angelo and were sitting around the
camp fire doing nothing when one cowboy said, "Let's go into town
and get something to drink."

Another one said, "Good idea, but we're all broke and the boss is
two days behind.  How you gonna get whiskey without money?"

He said, "Saddle up and go with me and I'll show you."

Now this would be worth seeing, so quite a few of the boys rode
with him into town--carrying jugs half full of water.

History tells us that along about that time, San Angelo was made
up of at least 20 saloons and fewer than that number of all other
stores combined.

Before the cowboys reached town, they all knew just what to do.
After hiding their billfolds in their saddle bags, they each took
a jug and split up, one going to this saloon and one to that
saloon and so on.

Then each in turn told the bartender that they were out on the
trail with only half a jug of whiskey, and would he finish
filling it up?  After the jug was filled, the cowboy would reach
for his wallet only to "discover" that he had lost it.  The
bartender would just have to take back his half-gallon.  The poor
boy would have to "make out" with only his original half-gallon.

Now, with quite a few cowpokes pulling this little stunt in about
half the saloons in San Angelo, you can bet your boots they rode
back to camp with plenty of what they came for, a little weak,
but free.

When Papa was a boy, the lives of his entire family had to do
with saddle horses and cattle.  Even the little girls liked to
ride horses and play cowboy.  The youngest girl, Annie, was one
of those little girls.  But when Annie became big enough to do
chores, one of her chores was to churn the milk that made the
butter for the family.  And she hated to have to stay home and
churn while her brothers rode out into the pasture after the
cows.

Now, I'm not positive of this, but knowing Papa as I do, I
wouldn't be surprised if he had something to do with helping his
little sister solve her problem.  Whoever it was, the idea worked
well and made a little girl happy.  She would tie a jar of milk
to her saddle and ride on out with the boys, letting her horse do
the churning.

At the Exum farm Mr. Whatley's pasture joined our field.  And in
his pasture he had an old cow which was well educated in the art
of breaking through fences.  And she seemed to enjoy slipping
into our corn patch.

Now, the normal procedure for the average farmer was to put a
yoke on the neck of such an animal.  Of course, the purpose of
the yoke was to bridge across the wires and stop the cow from
going through the fence.

But this old cow soon learned to use the yoke to break the wires
so she could get through the fence easier.  And she had been
spending entirely too much of her time in our field.  Mr. Whatley
either could not or would not keep her out.  Papa thought he
ought to keep her out.

I never learned where Papa got the idea of shooting the cow--
whether it was his own idea or whether a neighbor had prescribed
the remedy.  And even though Papa was smart in most cases, I
really think he used poor judgment when he shot the cow.  He only
meant for the shots to sting her enough to make our corn patch
unpleasant for her.  But he either misjudged his distance from
the cow or he misread the size of shot in the shell he used.

When he shot the cow, she just stood there, I guess wondering
what hit her.  Papa doubted that he had hit her at all.  So he
moved up closer and fired a second shot, which really hurt the
old cow much more than Papa had meant to hurt her.

When Mr. Whatley took a look at his cow, he was hurt even more.
He told the County Judge about it and the judge told Papa to pay
Mr. Whatley for his wounded cow.

Papa argued that the cow had damaged his corn more than he had
damaged the cow--in fact, more than the cow was worth.  The judge
agreed, that might well be true, but it didn't give Papa the
right to go around shooting his neighbor's cow.  Besides, in this
case, the corn would get well much sooner than the cow would.

Papa paid Mr. Whatley for his cow, and went home a little poorer
and a lot wiser.  I don't think Papa ever shot another cow.  If
he did, he didn't tell us about it.




CHAPTER 5

BOOKS, FOLKLORE, MEDICINE AND DREAMS

As I said earlier, I got along okay in school.  But throughout
school I was a slow reader.  And this reading slowness has
plagued me all my life.  It even caused me quite a bit of trouble
in college.  As a small boy, when Santa Claus brought me a book,
I was a little disappointed.  I'd much rather have gotten some
kind of a toy, especially one with wheels that would roll.

We kids learned early in life how to do things, purely a matter
of survival.  But learning the "why" of things often came through
reading and I was the slowest of readers.  Even in high school I
read very slowly, but I got what I read tolerably thorough.

I never read my history more than one time and I made "A"
throughout the course.  The same was true with stories and other
readings.  In college I only read my history once.  And I didn't
even review for the final test and came out with a "C."

There were a few books on the shelves in our house when I was a
boy.  Some had pictures, so I looked at them.  Some didn't have,
so I didn't look at them.  And I certainly didn't read them.

There were two books which stood out in our home, always
available and close at hand.  They were the Bible and the Sears,
Roebuck Catalog.  There were times when these two rivaled each
other in importance.  Yet they were both necessary, the Bible for
living and dying and the catalog for "What ye shall put on."  And
then the catalog, after a new one took its place each year,
became the forerunner of what we now know as bathroom tissue.

Each autumn after the first bale or two of cotton had been sold,
Papa and Mama would get the catalog down and make up an order
that would fill a wooden box half the size of a coffin.  Then we
would wait two or three weeks for the shipment to come from
Dallas.  Finally a postcard would come from the railroad depot in
Hamlin stating that the shipment had arrived.  The next time Papa
was in town in his wagon, he would go by and pick it up.

That night after supper we would all gather around for the grand
opening.  There was something in the box for one and all.

There was a pair of work shoes for each, and that pair would have
to last until the fall of next year.  Last year's would do to
wear to school awhile yet.  The new ones would do to wear for
Sundays until they began to look worn, then we could wear them to
school.  And they would last a long time if we would pull them
off as soon as we got in from school in the afternoons, and wear
our old ones for doing chores.  We could still wear our school
shoes for Sunday by shining them up a bit.  And of course, come
March the weather would be warm enough to go barefooted most of
the time.

There was underwear in the box, winter-weight that is.  We didn't
wear any in summer--just overalls and a shirt, that's all--well,
sometimes a straw hat.  And naturally we wore a cap in winter,
with ear flaps.  Each of us would get two suits of the underwear,
unless some of the smaller kids could wear some hand-me-downs,
and unless the hand-me-downs had already been handed down too
many times and were too far gone.

The winter caps came in the big box too, and two pairs of pants
for each boy, caps and pants all corduroy.  Needless to say, the
pants were the knee length kind, known as knickers, gathered with
elastic above the knees.  There were long pants for boys in their
late teens, and those came down to their shoe tops.  There were
socks too.  Socks were short and worn only by men and the big
boys with long pants.  Most of us boys got stockings which met
the knickers above the knees.  They were held up by garters of
black elastic.  The elastic also came in the box--yards of it.
And the garters were made to individual sizes by our mother whose
hands were never idle.  There might have been shirts in the big
box, though I think Mama made most all our shirts.

The corduroy knickers stood out full above the knees due to the
gathering by the elastic.  That caused the legs of the breeches
to rub together when we walked, and that rubbing caused a
swishing noise each time we took a step.  As we walked to school,
most of the boys went step, step, stepping along, but we Johnsons
went swish, swish, swishing along.  And everyone could hear that
we were wearing our new corduroy breeches.

There were things for the girls in the shipment too, and for
Mama.  But I didn't know what they got, except maybe a bundle of
cloth or two or three, to be made into dresses.  I suppose they
also made what they wore under the dresses.  But that was top
secret as far as we boys were concerned.  However, that didn't
bother me.  I was by women's clothing about like I was by Santa
Claus--not very inquisitive.  My field of research didn't include
girls' clothing.

As I grew older, of course, my attitude changed.  I became
somewhat interested in broadening my knowledge of girls and their
surroundings.  And so, with a feeling of guilt, and in strictest
privacy, I turned to the women's section of the Sear, Roebuck
Catalog for research and knowledge of the innermost secrets about
women's wear.

Now, in that big box from Sears, Roebuck there would be blue
denim for homemade overalls.  There would be pots and pans for
the kitchen, and gingham and calico and elastic and needles and
thread.  And there'd be a side or two of black harness leather
for making new lines and new traces and for repairing the old
ones.  Papa also used the same leather for shoe soles and heels.

There'd be shoe tacks and harness thread; bolts, nuts, and copper
rivets; leather lace for saddles, beeswax, welding flux and axle
grease; ropes for handling cows and horses, carpenter tools and
horse shoes.

And one year, for Frank and Susie, there was a phonograph and
some records.  Only I think the phonograph came in a separate
shipment later in the fall--perhaps for Christmas.

One of the favorite records for us smaller kids was "The Preacher
and the Bear."  After awhile those of us who couldn't read could
pick out that record easily because all the letters were worn off
the label.  Even people who could read couldn't read that one
because there was no reading on it.  We little kids had worn it
all off with our fingers making it go round and round.

In those days research and technology had not advanced to the
point where they could make a spring that wouldn't break.  Watch
springs broke in those days.  Cultivator seat springs broke.
Screen door springs broke.  And when automobiles came along,
their springs broke.

This phonograph had a wind-up spring, so it broke too.  That's
when we kids started putting our fingers on the label part of the
record and turning it ourselves.  Fingers got as good reception
as a spring, so we soon wore the label off playing our favorite
record

Sorry I wandered.  Let's get back to the big box.  In the box I
remember there was a big bolt of cotton-sack ducking.  We started
picking cotton in the fall with last year's old leftover sacks.
But now it was time for new sacks.  The old ones would make good
short sacks for the little kids.  The big new sacks would be for
those who picked the most cotton.

I didn't know it at the time but I learned later that the story
they used to tell us about Santa being overloaded on Christmas
Eve and couldn't bring all the toys was just not true.  The fact
was that Santa had ordered from Sears, Roebuck and they were out
of some of the items and would have to ship them later.  And by
the time those items arrived in Hamlin, Santa had to deliver them
a night or two later.

One year, in the big box, there was a set of shoe lasts and a
stand, for repairing all sizes of shoes.  I don't remember when
we got the set.  I think maybe it came to live with the family
before I did and it was as good as new after I was a grown man.
When Papa put new half soles on our shoes, he would punch holes
with an awl and we little kids always wanted to place the shoe
tacks in the holes.  Our helping didn't delay his work a great
deal--and he was always kind and patient with us as we labored
with him and got in his way.

Many of the items in the big box were surprising to us kids, but
a blue denim jacket was no surprise to Papa, because he was the
one who made out the order in the first place.  He also got
socks-
-a bundle of twelve pairs of gray Rockford work socks, also sock
supporters, suspenders, and sleeve holders.  Somewhere tucked
away among other relics of olden days, I think I still have a
pair of old sleeve holders.

You ask, "What are sleeve holders?"  Oh, I thought everybody knew
about sleeve holders.  In those days you didn't buy a shirt with
sleeves the length you wanted.  You just bought a shirt.  All the
sleeves were the same length--long enough for the longest arms.
Then you put on the little elastic holders and let them hold your
sleeves up to the desired length.  They were fancy little
miniature garters to wear over your shirt sleeves above the
elbows.

I have on my shelf a copy of the 1902 Sears, Roebuck Catalog and
I checked up to see if the socks I mentioned really were Rockford
Brand.  They were--and the price was 55 cents for one dozen
pairs.

In the big box there were also such items as safety pins, fruit
jar lids, Kodak film, Daisy fly poison, lamp wicks, and
sometimes, a few views for our stereo-scopes.

I'm sure there were other things in the big box.  I just can't
remember all that was in it.  One thing for sure, if we just had
to have it, it was in there.  If we didn't have to have it, we
didn't order it.

Now, a couple of nonessentials that were left off the order were
bicycle tires.  Papa knew that the old tires wouldn't hold air
and he knew they couldn't be patched.  But he knew they would
hold cotton.  So, he showed us how and we stuffed them full of
cotton.  And then we wrapped tire tape over the holes to keep the
cotton in.  And we wrapped tire tape around the tires and rims to
hold the tires on the rims.

You may ask, "Wasn't it hard to pedal?"  Boy!  I'll say it was
hard to pedal.  But I didn't care.  I couldn't reach the pedals
anyway.  Someone had to push me on it.  But I didn't have to push
anyone because I was too little to push anyone.  And the old bike
landed in the junk pile before I was big enough to push any of
the smaller ones on it.

Frank was through with the old bike when he handed it down to us
smaller kids.  He had gotten himself a motorcycle.  I believe it
was an Excelsior by name, although I think it was by name only.
It turned out to be not so hot.

The next thing I knew Frank owned a Buick automobile.  I think he
bought it from Uncle Simpson Johnson.  It had a four cylinder
engine, a spare tire, and a top that would fold down for easier
going when facing the wind.  The top could be put up to keep off
the rain and sunshine.  It was the model which had the two
leather straps running from the front corners of the top down to
the frame on both sides of the radiator.

Another thing I remember from my youth has to do with crazy
sayings which mean nothing in fact.  Some of them are about as
scientific as a black cat causing bad luck if he crosses your
path.

Anyway, most of the parents in our neighborhood didn't want their
kids going out in the hot sun bareheaded.  They would tell the
kids, "If you go out bareheaded, the old buzzards will puke on
your head."

One Sunday we were visiting Uncle Andrew's family.  At least ten
of us boys and girls started out into the pasture and someone
noticed that Lela, the youngest girl, didn't have her bonnet on.
The older ones told her the buzzards would puke on her head if
she didn't go back and get her bonnet.

About 55 years later, Lela told me that she had always had a kind
feeling toward me since that day because I was the only one of
the whole bunch who would wait for her.  All the others ran off
from us and left us to catch up as best we could.

When we threw a stick and it went end over end or round and round
sideways, that was just plain throwing a stick.  But if we
pointed one end forward and shoved the stick forward by a thrust
on the back end of it, our scientific name for that operation was
"puking" the stick.  And we might start one end of a stick
through a hole in a fence or over a fence and "puke" it through
or over in the same manner.

Another thing grown-ups told us kids was, "If you want to see the
wind, you've got to suck the old sow."  Well, I wanted to be able
to see the wind, but that seemed a little far out, even to me.
And before I got around to qualifying, I learned that they were
fibbing to us about it.  You still couldn't see the wind.

Here's another one for you.  When we killed a snake, we kids
wondered why he wouldn't stop wiggling.  We could even cut his
head off and he would keep right on wiggling.  They told us a
snake wouldn't stop wiggling till sundown, unless you turn him
over and make him lie on his back, then he would stop wiggling.
Trouble was, we couldn't get him to lie on his back.  Even with
his head off, he would keep rolling back over on his stomach, as
long as he could wiggle.

On the Exum farm, our house was about a half-mile from Grandma's
two-story house.  One day Mama sent me to Grandma's.  I don't
remember what I went for, but I do remember that when I got
there, I couldn't find Grandma anywhere.  I went all through the
house looking for her.

I didn't find her but I found a full box of matches on one end of
her sewing machine, where she always kept them.  Now, everyone
knows that all little boys like to play with matches.  And since
I was one of those little boys, I, too, liked to play with
matches, especially since I knew I was not supposed to touch
them.

So, I got a handful and went outside.  As I went, I struck them
on the porch wall, on the porch posts, on the bricks along the
flower beds and on the front yard fence.  Soon I was out of
matches and had to go back for more.

I figured that if a little handful of matches was that much fun,
a big handful would be a lot more fun.  My second handful was
really full.

This time I went out in the sand outside the yard and stood up a
row of matches in the sand with their tops up and close enough
together that the breeze would blow the flame from match to
match.  Then I lighted the match on the up-wind end of the row.
It worked perfectly and it was fun watching the flame leap from
match to match all the way to the far end.

I reasoned that too many missing matches would cause grown-ups to
become curious and begin asking questions.  And since they knew
that I had gone to Grandma's that day, I would be the first one
they would question.  So I limited my match pleasure to three
handfuls and then went home.

I still don't know why I was sent to Grandma's that day, but I
remember I was glad I went.  I came back with a deep, dark secret
of my own and a pleasurable memory to add to my storehouse.

In our youth, if any of us kids complained of feeling a little
under the weather, we were given a "scientific" medical
examination at bed time.  We had to stick out our tongue for our
parents to look at.  If there was the least bit of white coating
on the tongue, it meant we must take a calomel tablet and go to
bed.

I'm not sure I am spelling "calomel" correctly because I failed
to find the word in my small dictionary.  And I sort of doubt
that our family doctor knew how to spell it.  But it's just as
well.  I have yet to find a doctor who can write so anyone can
read what he wrote anyway.

But anyhow, that was the science of medicine in our family--if
the tongue is coated, take a pretty little pink tablet and wash
it down with a glass of water.

I hated even the thought of taking one.  The slightest taste of
one gagged me.  To prevent vomiting in the kitchen, I would ask
Mama if I could go out on the porch and take mine.

Now, I knew I wasn't apt to vomit on the kitchen floor, but Mama
didn't know it.  Another thing she didn't know was that there was
a knothole in the porch floor, under which, as years went by, a
small mound of pink tablets grew into a large mound.

They never caught me putting the tablets through the hole because
it was always dark.  No one ever took calomel in the daytime,
unless he had nothing else to do but sit around and wait for a
call to the bathroom, which was way out back in the cold--always
cold.  Not one of us ever had a coated tongue in the summertime.

Mama would say, "Hurry, now, it's cold out there."  I knew full
well it was cold out there.  But I wasn't about to take that
little pink tablet.  I was determined to go through ice or snow
or any other bad weather rather than have that little tablet go
through me.  It didn't take long for me to put a tablet through a
knothole, throw a glass of water out into the yard, and get back
into the warm kitchen.  I don't know how the other kids made out.
The knothole was my own secret which I shared with no one.

Looking back, I can easily see that I should have let the entire
family in on my secret.  They could have saved the cost of the
tablets as well as those miserable early morning trips to the
cold bathroom.  And as it turned out, the white coating on my
tongue disappeared during the night the same as theirs did.

I was about eight years old at the time--that is, at the time I
learned to use the knothole.  I enjoyed it until we moved away
from the Exum place.  By the time I was 12 or 14, I began to
understand the scripture where it reads, "As a man thinketh, so
is he."  The scriptures proved to be true.  I thought I didn't
want to take the tablets, so I didn't.  I thought I would get
well, so I did.

Another verse reads, "The Lord will provide."  We often overlook
the little things the Lord does for us, like putting knotholes in
the most convenient places.  Fifty years later, I learned that at
age eight I was a Christian Scientist.  They too, are a group of
people who do not believe in taking medicine.

Many years later, when I was 40 years old, a neighbor told me he
had fleas under his house and he wondered if I might know how to
get rid of them.  I told him, "Try Calomel.  I used it when I was
a kid and we didn't have fleas under our house."

When I was quite a small boy, a number of us were hoeing cotton
one day.  We had stopped at the end of the rows to get a drink
and sharpen our hoes.  Playfully, Frank picked me up and
pretended he was going to throw me over the fence and out into
the county road.  Well, he swung me over the fence and stood me
on my feet down in some weeds.  And there between my feet was a
beautiful little pocket knife.

This seemed almost too good to be true.  I was the happiest
little boy in the whole wide world.  I guess every boy wants a
pocket knife, and I had one--all my very own.

The others all looked at the knife and wished they had one like
it.  Jokingly, Frank said the knife was half his because, if he
hadn't pitched me over the fence, I wouldn't have found it.  So,
a few days later, when he asked if he could borrow it, naturally,
I loaned it to him, not because I thought it was half his, but
because he was my brother and wanted to borrow it.

Frank was going to school at Hamlin at that time and when I
thought it was time for him to return my knife, he told me that a
boy in town had borrowed it and wouldn't give it back.  And that
was the end of my knife.

Now, did I hate Frank for what he had done?  Of course not.  I
was too young to hate.  Hurt, yes, but hate, never!  I still
loved Frank just as much as I ever did.  And it was the same when
he had to correct me.  I loved him just as much while he was
whipping me as I did before he began and after he stopped.

At any rate, my little knife was gone for sure.  But a few weeks
later, I dreamed one night that I found another knife, just about
like the first one.  And, as before, I dreamed I found it by the
fence at the end of our cotton rows.  I dreamed I put the knife
in my pocket.  The next morning when I woke up, I went and
searched my pockets, but the knife wasn't there.

A few weeks later I dreamed of finding still another pocket
knife.  And I dreamed that I remembered having dreamed of finding
the first one but had lost it by putting it in my pocket instead
of holding onto it.  So this time I clutched it tightly in my
hand.  This time, I reasoned, it could not possibly get away from
me, even though I seemed to know I was dreaming.  I felt sure
there just had to be a way to pass from asleep to awake and bring
that knife with me.  But when I woke up, I was disappointed again
and had to conclude that it just couldn't be done.

After that decision, I began putting my dreams to better use.
When I dreamed a dream, and I seemed to realize that I was
dreaming, I would do things to entertain other kids--things no
one else could do, like sliding down the roof of a big barn,
dropping off the edge, and just before I hit the ground, I would
close my eyes so the fall wouldn't hurt me.

At other times I would tease a vicious bull until he would chase
after me, and just before he hit me I would laugh at him and
close my eyes.  He couldn't even find me, let alone hurt me.
Often I would open my eyes and get him to charge again, only to
lose me and miss me when I closed my eyes.

Our youngest son is named Larry.  And after he was a grown man, I
dreamed that he and I were going some place in a Model T Ford car
on a highway in Texas.  It had been raining for weeks and was
still raining.  The highway was muddy and the ruts were so deep
our axles were dragging.  We were wet, cold, tired, and stuck in
a mud hole.  Then the truth came to me.  I got in the car and
called to Larry to get in out of the rain and take it easy.  He
was puzzled, but he got in the car, sat down, and asked, "Why?"

I told him, "Relax and rest, I'll wake up in a few minutes and
everything will be all right.  I'm dreaming all this.  We're not
stuck out here in the mud.  It's not raining on us.  There are no
unpaved highways in Texas and no Model T cars on them.  I'm
dreaming that you are out here in this wet and cold with me.  You
are not really here.  You can't even hear me talking to you.  You
are lying up somewhere in a nice warm bed.  Come to think of it,
so am I."

I woke up sometime later and found things to be just the way I
had described them to Larry in my dream.

Another time I dreamed that Ima, my wife, and I were touring in
the mountains.  We had stopped at a lookout point and were
looking into the valley below.  Dinosaurs were grazing down there
and walking around.  One cute little fellow, with a neck about as
long as four telephone poles, came toward us and stuck his head
up over the rock banister where I stood.  Ima had gotten scared
and ran to the car.  I called to her, "Ima, don't be afraid.
Come back and let's pet him.  You know we're dreaming because
these things have been extinct for thousands of years.  Come on,
he won't hurt us and we'll be the only people living who ever
petted one--or even saw one."

In high school we were told that a long dream might take place
within a few seconds.  But I already knew it from first-hand
experience.

I was about nine years old when I had such an experience.  One
day I was riding in the back seat of our Reo car.  Papa was
driving at about his regular speed of twelve miles per hour down
a country road.  I was sleepy but still awake when we crossed Dry
Callie Creek on a noisy bridge.

Then I fell asleep and dreamed we went places and did things that
would have taken a couple of hours in real life.  When I woke up,
I thought I had slept all the way to town and almost all the way
back home.  I was disappointed because I had planned to buy some
candy while we were in town.

I looked around to see how far we were from home only to find
that we were about two hundred yards from the noisy bridge, and
were still on our way to town.




CHAPTER 6

PROSPERITY, ANIMALS, GROWING UP

We were about the luckiest kids in the world.  We always had as
much or more than the average kids in our neighborhood.  And of
course, we had each other.  But most of all, we had parents who
had the knack of teaching us how to get pleasure from working and
how to make our own fun, using a minimum of worldly goods while
doing it.

For instance, we played a game called "Driving the Old Sow."  The
equipment for playing the game cost absolutely nothing.  It
consisted of one beat-up tin can and a mesquite stick for each
player.  We spent many happy hours playing the game, especially
when we had a bunch of other kids to play it with us.

Many of our playthings were not bought with a lot of money, but
were the result of our parents' ingenuity and willingness to
build things for us, as well as playing with us and teaching us
how to live more abundantly.

We were the only ones who had a merry-go-round all our own.  It
was a big one--a four-seater, big enough for grown people.  And
we had to hold on tightly or be slung off.  There was a special
seat for the smaller ones so they wouldn't get slung off.  And of
course it was propelled by boy power.

At Christmas we got our share of toys and things, and we got
candy and fruits too.  We had apples during the entire year, and
we got bananas a few times.  But we never saw oranges except at
Christmas time.

On Christmas Eve nights, before we went to bed, we placed chairs
around the living room with a name in each one.  Gifts from Santa
were never wrapped.  He put my things in the chair with my name
in it, and the others likewise.  Next morning no one was allowed
to go into the living room until all were ready to go in.

We were taught that our family should work together to make a
more abundant life for all in the family, and now I was beginning
to see families working and playing together to bring a better
life to all in the community.

The Stevens family lived about a mile from us and one day one of
the boys got married.  The whole neighborhood knew that the
newlyweds were spending the night there at his parents' home.

I was only about nine years old, and I can't remember much about
that one and only chivaree I ever attended.  In fact, I don't
think there was much to remember about it.  But when they
explained to me just how a chivaree was carried on, naturally I
wanted in on the action.  Any country kid could beat a bucket
with a stick.  And it seemed that all the little kids and big
kids and grow people were there with buckets and pans and sticks.

We waited until all the lights were out in the Stevens' house.
Then we silently surrounded the house and when the signal was
given we all marched around the house drumming up all the noise
we could make.

After a few minutes, someone came out of the house with a lighted
kerosene lantern.  Then the newlyweds came out on the porch.  I
suppose they figured we wouldn't go away until they came out.
The groom came out into the yard and said something like, "Ah,
come on that's enough noise, leave us alone."  The older ones in
our bunch exchanged a few friendly words with them and then we
all told them goodnight and went home.

Like all farm families, we had animals.  And when a cow found a
new calf out in our pasture, one or the other of us kids would
claim it for our own.  We would beg, "Papa, can I have it?"  or,
"Mama, can it be mine?"  Yes, they said it could be ours.  And
so, it belonged to one of us kids.

Just about everyone of us had a calf or a colt all our own--until
it came time to sell it.  Then guess whose it became.  Papa's,
naturally.  But then, those of us who were young enough to
believe it was really ours in the first place, were young enough
to forget our loss easily.  After all, there was no harm done.
It had been ours while it was little and cute.

We had one old mare that we called Old Ribbon.  She was not only
called Old Ribbon, she was old and her name was Ribbon.  She was
gentle and slow and patient with us young ones and didn't seem to
mind if four or five of us rode her at one time.

To get up on Old Ribbon we had to lead her up beside a stump or a
tub or a wagon tongue or something else we could climb up on and
then jump on her back.

Along with her other admirable characteristics, Old Ribbon was
also smart.  When she didn't want us to climb up on her, she
would move away just far enough that, when we tried to jump on
her back, we would land on the ground between her and whatever it
was we jumped from.

If we cheated on Old Ribbon and helped each other up without her
having to get near some climbable object, she was still patient
and gentle with us.  She wouldn't pitch us off.  She didn't have
to.  She knew where there was a low-hanging limb on a tree that
she would walk under.  And when she did, there was no way anyone
could stay on her back.  What's more, there was no way we little
kids could keep her from that low limb.  If we pulled her head to
one side, she would go sideways to the limb.  Then we had a
choice--jump off or be forced off.  The one in front could hang
onto the limb; the others would all fall in a pile behind Old
Ribbon.  We soon learned it was best to bail out beforehand.

But one day, I remember, Old Ribbon gave us a little trouble.
However, I'm sure she didn't do it intentionally.

When the Abilene and Southern Railroad was being built into
Hamlin, Papa got a job helping clear the right-of-way.  And it
was Mama's job to take Papa's lunch to him.  Pardon, in those
days it wasn't lunch--it was dinner, at or near midday.  Then we
had supper at the close of day.  Anyway, Mama and I would hook
Old Ribbon to the old buggy and take Papa his dinner every day.
One day we took Papa's dinner to him and found him sawing down
trees where the railroad was to cross Dry Callie Creek.  While we
were there, he sawed into the hollow of a big elm tree and water
gushed out.  After the tree fell, the hollow stump was standing
full of water.  Of course, you've got to be a little kid for
something like that to impress you.  And that's what I was.

But it was another day that Old Ribbon impressed me.  It was
almost dinner time when Mama and I hooked her to the old buggy to
take Papa his dinner.  As usual, I was in the seat with Mama, and
the grub box was in the floor at our feet.  It was covered with a
clean white cloth to keep the flies and dust away.

Now, we hadn't gone more than a hundred yards from our house when
Old Ribbon had to do what comes natural for all horses to do.
But this time Old Ribbon had symptoms of dysentery and gas.
Either one without the other wouldn't have been so bad.  But both
together made it plenty bad.

The dashboard was only half large enough.  It caught what it
could; Mama and I caught most of the rest.  And the white cloth
over Papa's dinner caught its share--but it wasn't white any
more.  In your eyes, it burned, in your nose, it smelled
terrible, and in your mouth, it tasted a lot like what it really
was.

No question about it, there was just one thing to do, go back
home, wash up, wash the buggy, change clothes, change the cloth
over the dinner, hope it didn't go through onto the biscuits, get
going again and take Papa a late dinner.  Ho hum, dull life on
the farm, no excitement.

Papa may have been hungry by the time we got his dinner to him
and he may have been worried and weary.  He may have been upset
and Mama may have been upset but they couldn't afford to say
anything bad.  They didn't allow any sort of rough language in
our family.

Old Ribbon was a good gentle horse for Mama and us kids, but Papa
had some big horses he used to move heavy loads and haul his
cotton to the gin.  And in the rush cotton picking season, we
kids and Mama picked almost all of the cotton, while Papa took it
to town, got it ginned and then sold it.

There were many days when Papa would leave home before five
o'clock in the morning with a load of cotton, wait his turn at
the gin and not get home until after ten that night.

Ginning was slow in those days.  Sometimes it would mean that
Papa could get home an hour or two earlier if he could get to the
gin ahead of just one other farmer.  So, a good team was valuable
to a farmer during the cotton harvest season.

I never heard Papa tell of trying to go around another farmer on
his way to the gin.  But I have heard him tell of speeding up to
beat another man to a crossroads in order to be ahead of him when
they both turned the last corner toward town.  And I have heard
him tell of others trying to pass him on the road.  But I never
heard of one who succeeded.  Papa drove big horses with a lot of
endurance, and on a three-mile stretch of level road, they
usually held their own.

Despite all the work we had to do, we kids played a lot and had a
lot of fun.  When it rained at the Exum place, water ran out of
our pasture, across the parking area by our front yard, and
continued on down a road toward the blacksmith shop.

It had just come a hard rain and was still sprinkling a little.
So we took shovels and damned up the road where it was deepest
and not spread out so much.  Water was flowing into our small
lake almost as fast as we could build the dam.  The water backed
up and covered the parking area by our front yard.  By the time
the water stopped flowing and we stopped building the dam, water
was as much as three feet deep over an area as large as two or
three city lots.

I don't remember where Frank got his boat.  Nor do I know how
long he kept it nor whether he built it especially for that
occasion.  But I do know we went riding in his boat just outside
our front yard.  They even took Kodak pictures of us in the boat
on our little lake.

In two or three days the dam had to be destroyed and the lake
drained so we could use the road again and so we could get in and
out of our front yard.

The years passed quickly and during the period from 1912 to 1916
things were happening fast in our part of the country.  Hamlin
was growing up.  In the fall of the years, they had their fairs,
with their carnivals, large hot-air balloons, motorcycle races
and livestock shows.  Prosperity was spreading over our country
and everyone who wanted to work could get a job.

Frank took his horse and buggy and carried the mail at times, as
a substitute carrier.  But for some reason unknown to me, he
became disenchanted with the job and gave it up.

Papa bought our first auto in 1916.  It was a 1914 model Reo,
five-passenger touring car--the cost, $800.  We drove it until
1922, then junked it.

That Reo car had a feature I have never seen on any other car.
The left pedal was a clutch pedal the first half-way down.  The
remainder of the way down, it became a foot brake.  The right
pedal was an emergency brake.  Both had ratchet-type bars
underneath which held them down to the desired place.

Handy?  You bet!  Many car owners wished their cars had the
clutch and brake under one foot.  It was especially handy when
starting a car headed uphill, because it left the right foot free
to work the gas feed.

The old Reo didn't have a lot of power to brag about--maybe about
as much as a couple of wooden-legged donkeys.  I remember we went
to Lamesa in it one time.  Going up the Cap Rock, it just
couldn't make it alone.  The road was steep and rocky.  The
Buick, which we bought later, would go up the hill with all of us
still in the car.  But the Reo was different.

We not only had to get out and walk up, we had to push the Reo up
too.  There were about four or five of us pushing, and two of us
were carrying rocks to put behind the wheels when it stopped.
Then the driver would "rev" up the motor, let up on the clutch,
and with all of us working together, we would move the car
forward and upward two or three steps.  Then again, rocks behind
the wheels--quickly.

That kind of life gave people something to do besides griping and
asking Washington for handouts.  It also gave a man pride in
ownership, especially if the car he owned would outdo the car his
neighbor owned.

Bragging on your car was a way of life in early carhood days.  If
a man had a car that could do anything his neighbors couldn't do,
that was something to brag about.  No two cars were alike.

But now, 60 years later, we find that auto-makers have wiped out
all differences and are making all cars alike.  No matter which
company made the car you are driving today, you have nothing to
brag about.  Today's cars all have at least four things in
common-
-they are too big, too powerful, too costly and burn too much
gasoline.

But it hasn't always been that way.  About the same year we
bought our Reo, a neighbor family of ours had a flat tire.  They
set the emergency brake while they jacked up the car to put the
spare on.  Then when they got going again, they forgot to release
the brake and drove about a half-mile with the brake on.  Later,
one of the boys in that family bragged that their car was so
powerful it went a half-mile with both hind wheels sliding.

My brother, Frank, got rid of his motorcycle and his Buick car
and bought a Grant auto.  It had a reputation of having great
power.  They said you could run the front bumper up against a
tree and it had enough power to sit there and spin the wheels on
dry land.  That was a lot of power for that time.

One fellow who didn't think too highly of the Grant said he knew
a man who bought one and, not having a garage to lock it in,
drove it out by his hog pen and chained it to the pen.  That
night some thieves came, cut the chain and stole the pen.

But before cars made it so handy for farmers to drive into town
to buy supplies, peddlers were already plentiful, bringing
supplies to the farmers.

Horse-drawn rigs were apt to pull up at our farm almost anytime.
They had for sale most anything you might want, from kitchen
utensils to medicine; hardware to veterinarian supplies; needles
and thread and blue denim.  You name it--they had it--even
horseshoes and nails.

With the new prosperity came growth, and as a country grows so do
her cities and towns.  And as towns prosper, they breed violence.

I was only a kid but I heard some grownups telling about a man
who got shot in Hamlin.  One man was after another man with a
shotgun.  He got off one good shot, which proved to be effective
enough.  The man who got shot ran into a hardware store, ran
through the store and out into the alley, up the alley a few
doors, then ran back into a drygoods store.  There he crawled
under a counter to hide and died.  That's how I remember it.
That's all I ever heard about it.  I don't know who got shot nor
why.

During all this time, naturally, we kids were growing up too.
Frank was almost a grown man and Susie had fallen in love.  When
she was born, they named her Susie.  But it wasn't long till her
Aunt Annie nicknamed her "Sookie."  She hated that nickname ever-
so-much.  Nevertheless, she was stuck with it until she began to
get serious about having Dode Sanford over to our house for
supper quite a few times through the week and almost every Sunday
night.  Then she began asking us kids to call her Susie.  She
even gave us a penny now and then to do so.

Fifty years later she moved to California and changed her name
again--to Susan.  Some girls are just never satisfied with what
other people give them.  She still argues that she was named
Susan to begin with.  And she's probably right, Jones County
didn't start keeping records until four years later.

Anyway, Uncle Jim's farm joined our farm on the east.  Dode was
working for Uncle Jim on his farm.  That made Dode and Susie
next-
door neighbors.  I think that was about the time I began to learn
a little bit about what being sweethearts was all about.

Well, the long-awaited day finally arrived and Susie and Dode got
married.  I don't remember much about it all.  In fact, I never
did know much about it.  They didn't tell me and I didn't know
enough about it to know what kind of questions to ask to find out
more.  If I remember right, it seems they just drove away in the
car one day with Papa, and when they returned, someone told me
they were married.  I couldn't tell by looking; they looked the
same as ever to me.  I was told they went to see a preacher but I
didn't know what for.

Even at that early date, the county began to need better roads.
Farmers were allowed to work on the county roads so-many days a
year as a way of paying their taxes.  The road work could be done
at a time most convenient to the individual farmers.  This was
not a matter of welfare handouts to farmers.  Rather, it was a
case where farmers worked together to improve conditions in their
community and still keep their money at home.

If a man was unable to do his share of the road work, the county
would collect tax money from that man and use it to hire another
man to work in his place.

Papa did his share of the county road work.  But with that work
added to all his regular farm work, he had to search for faster
and better ways to do some of his work.

You see, one of Papa's big problems was that he had a house full
of growing kids who could use a spoon right well at the dining
table, but were too little to use a feed-heading knife in the
field.

There just wasn't enough time to head our feed in the fall.  Papa
had a row binder with which to bundle the feed.  But he wanted
feed heads in the barn to feed his work horses.

So he bundled the feed with his binder and shocked it up to dry.
While it was drying, he built a large knife, somewhat like those
paper cutters you have seen in print shops.  He bolted the cutter
to one sideboard of his wagon Then he would drive the wagon up
beside a shock of feed in the field, and while he placed the
heads of a bundle across the lower knife blade, one of us boys
would bring the upper blade down and cut the heads off the
bundle.  When the heads were cut off, they fell into the wagon.

The cutter worked quite well when Papa had the proper boy
operating the knife, but sometimes he had to use me to help him.

As I said, Papa and I did a lot of things together.  Cutting
heads off bundles was one of those things.  Almost cutting his
hand off was another.

One day Papa was placing the bundles into the cutter and I was
working the upper knife.  I thought he was ready for me to cut,
but he hadn't gotten his hand back out of the cutter.  It looked
to me like a bad cut.  It bled a lot at first.  I sure regretted
what I had done, but I guess it wasn't cut very badly because he
wrapped his bandanna around his hand and we went right on with
our work.

Papa was always and forever doing things that fascinated me and,
at the same time, taught us to use our heads and develop our
skills.

When we had used all the hot water washing our feet at bedtime,
and there was not enough water for Papa to wash his, he didn't
seem to mind.  He would get a wash pan of cold water, set it on
the hearth and put in live coals of fire until his water was hot
enough.  We kids liked to hear the hot coals sizzle in the water.

There were times when the kitchen was too cold for comfort at
early breakfast time.  Of course, the dining table was in the
cold kitchen.  Well, Papa would take an open-top, five-gallon can
with about four inches of ashes in the bottom and a few
shovelfulls of hot coals on top of the ashes and set the can
under the dining table.  That would warm our feet while we ate
breakfast.  And it would also help warm up the kitchen.

So, it was there at the Exum place that I spent six of the best
years of my life.  They were years of family contentment and
prosperity--we youngsters working, playing, exploring, wading in
the creek, hunting rabbits with air rifles, going to school;
gathering eggs, feeding chickens, feeding cows and horses;
playing in the barn, playing in the cottonseed, eating peanuts in
the barn loft, wading in puddles after summer showers; enjoying
the warm fire in the fireplace, washing our feet by the warm
hearth at bedtime, snuggling between warm blankets in cold
bedrooms; in short, growing up and enjoying every minute of it.




CHAPTER 7

DRY YEARS ON THE TEXAS PLAINS

Papa had two rancher brothers, Joe and Simpson, who had remained
in the cattle business when all the rest of the Johnsons went to
farming.  And Papa preferred cattle ranching over cotton farming.
So he got the urge to get back to growing more cattle and not so
much cotton.

This was not just a far-out dream as if he didn't know what he
was doing.  After all, he had been in the cattle business with
his father until the time they all moved back to Texas from
Oklahoma.  At that time he went to farming because it required
far less capital to be a farmer than to be a rancher.  And he was
a young man just starting out on his own.

But now he had accumulated a little of this world's goods and he
thought it was time to step up to a larger place that would grow
enough cows and calves to afford a better future for him and his
family.  This was not just a wild adventure.  He knew it was
easier to grow a dollar's worth of calves than it was to grow a
dollar's worth of cotton.

We had prospered greatly during our six years on the Exum farm.
But our chances for expanding in Jones County were limited.  Most
of the good pasture land had been cleared and put into
cultivation.  But on the West Texas plains there was ample room
to expand.  The soil was rich for farming and yet not too
expensive for pasture land.

So in 1916 Papa went to that land of promise and bought a section
of unimproved land ten miles southwest of Lamesa.  It was a half-
mile wide and two miles long.  It was part of the old
Higginbotham Ranch.  The ranch was being sold piece-by-piece for
farms.  And it seemed to be a very good place to grow feed and
cattle.

Now Papa knew he would have to have a place to live.  He knew he
couldn't move onto unimproved land and start making a living on
it.  So he also bought another smaller farm about five miles from
the large one.  It was fairly well improved.  His plan was to
live on the small farm while he sent us kids to school, built
five miles of wolf proof fence around the new land, had a well
drilled, put up a windmill and a water tank and built an eight-
room, two-story house to live in.  He did all this on the new
land.

With that much completed, we moved onto the new farm and started
building a small barn, chicken house, car shed, tool house, storm
cellar, wash house, an out house, a yard fence, field fences and
cross fences.  This all took quite a spell but by this time the
place was fairly well improved.

But wait--before we did anything to either farm we moved into the
house on the small farm in the dead of winter.  Dode and Susie
moved in with us--or rather, we moved in with them.  The plan was
for them to farm the small place and we would farm and ranch the
large place.  We would live with Dode and Susie until we made the
other place livable.

There we were, all of us, in the cold winter, waiting for the
weather to cooperate so we could begin improving the raw land.

Meanwhile the family who sold us the small farm with the house on
it, and who had planned to be moved out by this date, had not
moved out.  And since it was coming a blue norther and snowing
outside.  They were not in a big hurry to move out.  But they
were kind to us and shared with us what they had--which was ours
of course.

There were four in their family.  They retained the kitchen with
a cookstove in it, the livingroom with a heating stove in it, and
a bedroom.  They let us have two small rooms in which to store
our furniture and cook and eat and sleep.

There was no flue for a stove in our part of the house.  We ran a
stovepipe out through one window and attached the lower end of it
to a small heating stove so we could fry flapjacks and heat the
room.  But when the wind blew from the wrong direction, the fire
smoked up our rooms and we had to aim the stovepipe out another
window more in keeping with the direction the wind was going.

It seems that the family in the other part of the house was named
Stewart--Mr. and Mrs. Stewart and their two kiddos.  Boy!  Did
they deal us misery by not sharing a greater portion of our house
with us.  I think I would hate everybody named Stewart except I'm
not quite sure Stewart is the right name.

Man, it was cold!  As I said, there were four of them in three of
our rooms with good stoves in two of the rooms.  And in the two
rooms that we had there was Papa, Mama, Susie, Dode, Earl, Joel,
Albert, Ollie Mae, William Robert, and me--ten of us.  And out in
the pasture were all our cows and horses, practically freezing to
death.  Mr. Stewart was using our sheds for his cows and horses.

Papa had bought two or three carloads of cows in Jones County and
had shipped them to Lamesa by rail, along with our horses,
household goods and farming tools.

You know the old saying, "Things could have been worse."  Well
this time we didn't think things could ever be worse.  But we
were wrong.  They did get worse; 1917 was a dry year.

We kids went to school while Dode and Papa went about farming the
small farm and improving the large one.  The dry weather
prevailed throughout the year.  Grazing dried up and cattle got
poor.  Papa did what he could to feed his family and his
livestock.

The United States was at war with Germany and, luckily for us,
Uncle Sam was buying rabbits.  Jackrabbits brought ten cents each
and cottontails brought six or eight cents.  When we killed a
rabbit, all we had to do was cut open his abdomen and sling his
intestines out.  Then we pitched the rabbits into the wagon and
took them to town in the next two or three days.

We were looking for most any honorable way to pick up an extra
dollar.  I have seen Papa and Mama take a 22 rifle and a lunch
and some horse feed for their team and go out in a wagon and stay
all day, while we kids were in school.  Before night they would
come home with rabbits piled eight or ten inches deep all over
the wagon bed.

One man bought a single-shot 22-rifle and some shells on credit--
about eight dollars worth.  In one week he brought in enough
rabbits to pay off the debt.  That was one time you might say
rabbits saved our lives.

During the dry weather, while we were slowly losing about
everything we ever had, Papa hired out to haul cottonseed cake in
his wagon to ranchers somewhere west of Lamesa.  I didn't know
where he was taking it but there were times I didn't see him more
than once or twice a week.

Monroe Hamilton was one of our neighbors.  He and his family
lived about a mile from us.  During the drought of 1917 his work
horses got so weak and poor that they became exhausted while
plowing in the field.  They stopped in the middle of the field
and had to be unhitched and walked home.  He began feeding them
more and working them less while they regained their strength.
Mid-afternoon was about as long as they could keep working.

By the time the horses were strong enough to work all day again,
they had become accustomed to stopping their work about mid-
afternoon and they refused to pull the plow after that time of
day.

One day Monroe became so unhappy with them that he unhitched them
in the field where they had staged their sit-down strike, drove
them to the barn, hitched them to his wagon and trotted them
eight miles to Lamesa to get the mail.  Then he trotted them
eight miles back home.  They had never experienced becoming
exhausted while pulling a wagon out on the road.  They were not
smart enough to pull a sit-down strike anywhere except plowing in
the field.

During World War I, Frank wanted to join the Army.  But Mama and
Papa did their part in talking him out of it.  He was too young
to be drafted.  But he wasn't at home much after that.  He worked
here and there in defense work.  He told us he worked awhile in a
powder factory in West Virginia.  After the war was over, he came
home in 1919 and worked some for Dawson County, doing some
mechanical work on a road grader tractor.  Finally, Papa bought a
big truck and let Frank take it and go wherever he could find a
job, hauling whatever anyone would pay him to haul.

Another source of income for us during the dry weather was in
gathering and selling dry bones.  There was a ready market for
bones in Lamesa.  A lot of cows had died here and there due to
dry weather and cold weather.  We hauled and sold quite a few
bones.

We also salvaged a lot of rawhides--dry rawhides.  We couldn't
sell them but we could use them ourselves.  They were hard and
stiff, but by soaking them in water we were able to straighten
them out, cut them into strips and use the strips for braiding
whips and making other useful articles to be used on the farm.

Despite all the work, we boys had some time off for fun and
adventure.  There were times after rains when it was too wet to
plow.  But then there might be bushes to be grubbed or we might
have to build fence or maybe chop wood or do any one of a dozen
things that kept bobbing up to be done.  If and when we got all
those things done, and then if it was still too wet to plow or
hoe weeds, then we had some time off for ourselves.  Also on
Saturday afternoons we took time off, unless there was something
which just had to be done.

We always had Sundays off for rest and play, but never for work
of any kind, that is, work which was of any monetary value,
except routine work like milking cows and feeding the livestock.
The question of work came up one Sunday afternoon when we put
some new tires on our car to go watch an airplane at Lamesa.  But
then, that was regarded as play since it involved only recreation
and had nothing to do with work which could in any way produce
anything of value.  Sunday was a day for going to church,
resting, visiting friends, playing games, reading, or just
sitting.

Now, if we boys wanted to go out into the pasture and kill a
snake or two with sticks, that was okay.  And if we could get a
rabbit without a gun, that was all right too.  But, no guns on
Sundays.  When a rabbit ran into a prairie dog hole, we could
twist him out with a barbed wire.  That was okay on Sunday.

We would run a barbed wire down into the hole and twist it by
means of a crank at the upper end, which was nothing more than
the wire itself bent in the shape of a small crank.  As the wire
revolved over and over down in the hole, it would get the barbs
entangled in the rabbit's fur and we could pull him out of the
hole.  That was called "rabbit-twisting."

The idea of sin being connected with shooting a gun on Sunday had
probably been handed down from pioneer days when men lived by
hunting game.  In those days hunting was a means of making a
living, therefore it was work, and work was not to be done on
Sunday.

Despite the dry weather that seemed to threaten our very
existence, we used water from our well and grew quite a bit of
garden produce.  Our garden was like an oasis in a dust bowl.
And then, one day we received a bit of news that was like an
oasis of good news in our desert of bad news.

Uncle Robert got word to us that Old Scotch had returned home to
the Exum place.  Papa began getting the car ready immediately and
went after him.  I think maybe Joel went with Papa.

A family named Bristow was living on the Exum farm when Old
Scotch returned.  Mr. Bristow thought this might be our dog, but
he was not sure.  He said it looked as though the dog had
traveled a long, long way.  The first thing Old Scotch did was
lie down in the yard and rest.  Then he chased all the chickens
out of the yard as he had done many times before.  Next he went
into the house and slowly looked through all the rooms, as if
looking for something familiar to him.  Finding no one he knew,
he went back out into the yard to rest again.

Then Mr. Bristow phoned Robert Johnson to see if he might know
our dog.  Robert drove over in his Buick.  Old Scotch met him way
down the road and leaped for joy beside the car all the way back
to the house.  He had finally found new hope.  The Buick motor
was music to his ears and, although Robert was not home folks, at
least the dog knew him as a friendly neighbor.

When Robert got out of his car, Old Scotch leaped up into the
front seat, sat down and put his paws on the steering wheel.
When Robert saw him do that, he turned to Mr. Bristow and said,
"That's their dog all right."

We had no telephone on our farm on the plains.  And we were ten
miles from Lamesa.  I don't know how Robert got word to us about
Old Scotch, but Papa lost no time in bringing him home.  The
round trip was 280 miles.

When Papa brought the dog home he was covered with lice, there
were sores on his body, some of his beautiful coat had fallen
away and his feet were sore from traveling so far.  He had lost a
lot of weight, was poor and half starved.

We believe that some Gypsies stole him and tied him to their
wagon.  Gypsies came by our farm now and then, and both we and
our neighbors had a low opinion of them.  Theirs were the only
poor, skinny dogs we ever saw.

Anyway, we were mighty glad to have Old Scotch back with us and
we soon had him as fat and sassy and as good looking as ever.
And he was right there with us all the rest of his life.

Now that we had our dog back home, it was time again to settle
down to facing the realities of dry weather and sandstorms.  One
day there came a sandstorm from the southwest, as usual.  We had
many sandstorms but this one was not just one of the ordinary
ones.  This was an extra special--the granddaddy of all
sandstorms.  We kids were in school at Ballard and it got so dark
in the schoolhouse we couldn't see to read.  We could only sit
and talk or play games.  You could clean the dust from the top of
your desk, and two minutes later write your name with your finger
in the new dust.

When school was out at four o'clock in the afternoon, it was so
dark the teacher was afraid some of us couldn't make it home.
She held us there until our parents came for us.  The wind was
still very strong.  Everyone drove with their lights on, not to
see the road but to see each other.

We couldn't see the sunset--couldn't even see where the sun was
supposed to set.  We didn't believe there were any clouds, only
sand and dust.  But we really couldn't tell.  Anyway, dark came
way before its time.

At suppertime that night there was so much sand and dust in the
air in our kitchen that we ate supper with the tablecloth still
spread over the table, over the food, and over the plates we were
eating out of.  We held the cloth up with one hand to shelter our
plates while we reached under the cloth with the other hand to
bring food from our plates to our mouths.

During the afternoon, sand blinded the rabbits and they couldn't
find their way to their burrows.  Jackrabbits don't usually
burrow, but cottontails always do when they need shelter.  This
time it was different.  They needed shelter but couldn't find it.
This time they all sat behind bushes with their tails turned to
the wind and sand.

For hours the sand didn't let up.  About ten o'clock that night
the wind shifted around to the west, a little while later, to the
north, and then to the northeast.  It still didn't slow up.  Each
time it changed directions, it stirred up more sand.

As the wind shifted, so did the rabbits.  They moved around their
respective bushes, keeping behind the bushes from the sand, and
with their tails still windward.

When the wind came out of the north, it became very cold and
began to snow.  The temperature got down below zero that night
and many rabbits froze to death and were buried under the snow.

For a week or two after that storm, we went hunting and shot dead
rabbits, not knowing they were already dead.  They were still
sitting under bushes and looking very much like live rabbits.  We
continued to shoot dead rabbits until they were all eaten by
coyotes and buzzards.

It was reported that one rancher near Lamesa lost 500 cows that
night from the cold and the snow.

On one side of our house snow drifted into a huge pile halfway up
our windows.  After it melted, the sand which blew in with the
snow was at least two feet deep.  That was the first time I can
remember when snow was so dirty we couldn't make snow ice cream.
However, there were many other times later on.

Here is another little rabbit story.  On one occasion when Frank
was home, he went rabbit hunting with the other four of us boys.
We hadn't had much luck until almost sundown.  By that time we
were still about four or five miles from home and we came to
another windmill and waterhole.  There was a lot of sagebrush
around the waterhole and jackrabbits began to hop up here and
there.  This place was so far from civilization the rabbits were
not much afraid of us.  They would hop off a way and stop and sit
up and look back at us.

We all spread out and took a swath about the width of a city
block and circled the waterhole one time--and killed more
jackrabbits than we could carry home.  We swung some of them over
our shoulders, tied some to our overall suspenders and carried
some in our hands.  It was a long way home and we were plenty
tired before we got there.

During our stay on the plains, tractors had not yet established
themselves on American farms, at least not in our part of the
country.  Men were still raising fine work horses and looking
forward to raising even bigger and better ones.  A neighbor named
Debnam bought the biggest horse I ever hope to see.  A big man
had to reach high to touch his nose, and few men could reach the
top of his shoulders.  He was one of the six largest stallions in
the United States and he cost the man $3,600.  By the time he was
three years old he weighed 2600 pounds, and his feet were about
as large as a cedar water bucket.

Now Papa needed at least four of those fine work horses but he
didn't have the money to buy them, and he couldn't get the money.
And farm tractors were almost unheard of before the late 1920s.
However, there was a company that made an attachment to go on a
Model T Ford car which was supposed to make a tractor out of the
car.  The manufacturers name for the "thing" was "Pull-Ford."
Papa heard of a man who had such a contraption, so he went to
look at it.

Now, the fact that the man was not using the gadget should have
told Papa something.  Moreover, the fact that he was willing to
sell it at a bargain should have told Papa something more.  And
finally, when he went and looked at it and saw that it was
practically unused, that should have been the final message to
Papa.

But Papa wasn't listening good.  He was a man in trouble.  Dry
weather and sand colic had claimed some of his best work horses.
And he could buy this thing for a lot less than four horses would
cost.  Anyway he bought the attachment and made it fit on the
Reo.  I suppose he reasoned that a Reo owner had more sense than
a Ford owner, and even if it was not a success on the man's Ford,
he could make it do the job on a Reo.

Well, anyway he bought it and brought it home and a few days
later he had it all rigged on the old car and ready to go.  It
didn't prove to be the best tractor in the world, in fact, it
might compare with a modern tractor of today about like the
Wright Brothers' first flying machine would compare with a
superjet.

Anyhow it worked some.  It took one to drive the car and one to
ride the plow.  It didn't replace the horse in the field half as
well as the Reo car replaced the horse on the road.  Yet it
filled in somewhat when feed was scarce and horses were tired.
This monster didn't have to stop and rest, just stop to get water
and cool off.  As a tractor it wasn't so hot--it only got hot.

We didn't spend all of our time at hard work on the farm.  Come
Saturday afternoon, if we were pretty well caught up with our
farm work, we would spend an hour or two in Lamesa.

I remember one time we were in Lamesa, when I was eleven years
old.  I had spent all my money except a dime.  I wanted to buy a
pocketbook to put my money in.  There were four stores in town
that sold pocketbooks and I went to all of them but it was of no
use.  The cheapest one any of them had was ten cents.  Now, if I
spent my dime for one, I wouldn't have any money left to put in
it.  And if I didn't buy one, I was apt to lose my dime.  What
should I do?  That was a big decision for me to make.

I went back to each store time and again, hoping to find a five
cent pocketbook I had overlooked before.  But it just wasn't
there.  And I don't recall whether I bought a ten cent one or
kept my dime.

Now you may ask, "If you can't remember whether or not you bought
the purse, how can you remember it was on a Saturday?"  That's
easy.  Saturday was about the only day we went to town.  I was a
big boy before I learned that there were people in town on other
days of the week.  I hardly knew that stores opened except on
Saturday.

I remember another time in Lamesa when a kid about my size was
aggravating me.  Now, we kids were taught not to fight.  I grew
up not knowing how to fight, not wanting to fight and thinking
that boys who did fight were bad boys.  And here I was, faced
with the stark realization that I needed something I didn't
have--the ability to make a bully leave me alone.  I was about as
big as he was, but I was afraid he had the know-how to fight in a
way that could hurt a country boy like me.

I didn't want to fight the boy.  I only wanted him to go away and
leave me alone.  But he had other plans.  We went in and out
among the cars parked by the curb.  I was always in the lead, he
was after me.  Somehow I had hoped that I could lose him.  But he
kept coming back, pinching and hitting me a little harder each
time.  I really think my not fighting him encouraged him to get
tougher and rougher.

Then he got me out behind the cars, out near their back wheels,
and he was just about to really let me have it.  People on the
sidewalk couldn't see us.  It was just him and me.  I had to do
something--so I hit him and ran.  That proved to be the best
thing I could have done.  He came right after me.  I knew he
might hit me but he couldn't hit me in the face and bloody my
nose--I had my back to him.

I jumped up on the curb with the bully right on my heels.  The
first man I passed asked, "Is that boy bothering you?"  Before I
could answer him, the boy had turned and was going away.  He
didn't bother me any more.  He probably thought the stranger was
a friend of mine and that he had better leave me alone or else
the man would get him.

On another trip to Lamesa I went with Papa one day into the back
of a hardware store--back among the shelves of bolts and nuts and
things.  Way back there were stacks of silver dollars and half
dollars and other coins, lying there on a shelf where the store
was only half lighted.  Papa and the clerk were around behind
some other shelves.  They couldn't even see me.  It would have
been easy to slip some money into my pocket and walk away.  But I
didn't, and I have wondered a lot of times just why I didn't.

There was no question but that I knew it would be the wrong thing
to do.  Yet I don't believe the moral aspect kept me from taking
at least some of the money.  That is to say, I could have lived
with my conscience but I could not have lived with the
condemnation I would have gotten from my family, once they
learned about it.  And I knew that somehow they would learn about
it.  Then there would have been the "dishonoring" of thy father
and thy mother.

This would not have been a small thing, like talking back to
Frank in the cotton patch years ago.  That was an isolated case
of one boy doing wrong and receiving his punishment.  It was my
punishment alone, it hurt no one else in the family and it was
soon forgotten.  But taking any part of the money from the store
would have been altogether different.  There would have been no
way for me to take some of it, then take my punishment and not
hurt my folks.

Until the depression years of the 1930s, merchants never fooled
around with pennies.  If the wholesale cost of an item was four
cents, he would usually sell it for ten cents.  Then he could
sell the items at two for 15 cents and still make a good profit.

Well, Papa wanted to buy us kids some firecrackers but the war
was on and they had gone from five cents a package up to ten
cents a package.  With six kids at home, that would put quite a
strain on Papa's pocketbook.  So while he was figuring how many
to buy, my brother Joel began dickering with the clerk.

"Two for 15 cents?" he asked.

"Yes," came the reply.

"Four for a quarter?"

"Yes, I guess so."

"Nine for a half dollar?"

"Well, yes, okay."

Papa bought the nine packages and we all laughed at how far that
was from ten cents each.

Susie had gotten married about the time we moved to Lamesa.  And
with her away from home, Mama was always short handed in the
kitchen, there being so many men and boys in the family and only
one little girl still at home, and she was too little to be of
much help.  And since Mama's kitchen work extended to the milk
shed, the henhouse, the vegetable garden, the wash house, the
clothes line, the ironing board, the yard and a few other odd
jobs about the place, she had to cut all the corners she could.

She never put our eating dishes up in the cabinet.  After she
washed them, she stacked them back on the dining table and
covered them with a cloth.  So, she didn't have to place the
dishes at mealtime.  We simply sat down and got our own plates
and tools.  And we took only the tools we needed.  There was no
need to have to wash a knife, a fork and a spoon when a spoon was
all we needed to use.

We grew up not knowing there were different forks to use for
different things.  We used the rule of instinct in choosing the
tool to use.  That is, "If it's hard, use a knife, if it's soft,
use a fork, and if it's wet, use a spoon--except in the case of
molasses.  You sop molasses up with a piece of biscuit."

To save time and effort, Mama also left certain foods on the
dining table--the salt, sugar, pepper, syrup, honey, vinegar,
pepper sauce and other such things.  These were all covered with
the same cloth that covered our dishes.  We had no refrigerator.
Nothing would spoil at our house, we ate it before it had time to
spoil.

Mama needed help to wash the dishes after supper.  But boys don't
like to wash dishes.  So Mama was in trouble--but not for long.
She came up with an ultimatum:  "You wash your own supper dishes
or eat out of your same plates for breakfast."

This was a boy's dream come true--no dish washing.  This was the
beginning of my sopping my plate clean.  We all did.  We could
lick our spoons as clean as any woman could wash them in a
dishpan.  And I seldom used any tool except a spoon.  Plates were
no problem either.  When it comes to shining plates, a good,
tough biscuit rind in the hands of a growing boy could just about
put a soap factory out of business.  And no matter what he sopped
out of his plate, it added flavor to his biscuit.

When we were through licking and sopping, each of us would place
our spoons on the table at our respective places, turn our plates
upside down over them and take off for things more interesting.
The last one to finish would help Mama spread a cloth over the
entire table and the job was completed.  Mama was out of the
kitchen in no time at all.  We had learned a long time ago not to
take anything on our plates that we couldn't eat.  Now that habit
was paying off.




CHAPTER 8

MOVED TO JONES COUNTY; PICKED COTTON IN OKLAHOMA

The dry weather still prevailed, and in spite of all our efforts
to earn extra money, we were getting deeper into trouble month by
month.  By the summer of 1918 we were about finished in our new
venture.  There was no grazing and no money for livestock feed.
Cows and horses grazed the short grass, taking in sand with each
bite.  Sand clogged their stomachs and they died with sand colic.
Many died but a few didn't.

Something simply had to give.  We just had to try something else.
After a long heart-breaking battle against the elements, we
rounded up the remaining cattle and drove them to the railroad
stockyards at Lamesa.  That was a slow exodus.  They were so poor
and weak some fell by the wayside and didn't finish the ten-mile
drive.  Most of them did make it.  I don't know where Papa sold
them nor what he got for them.  I know he couldn't have gotten
much.

After that, we sold the smaller farm and got rid of the Buick
car.  Susie and Dode moved onto the large farm, and the rest of
us moved to a farm near the community of Abbie, about nine miles
east of Hamlin.  We bought out a crop from someone in mid-summer.
It, too, proved to be a failure--we made three bales of cotton.

In that year and a half we had lost most of our money, our
cattle, quite a few of our horses and our best car.

After the crop failure at Abbie we had to try something else
again.  So we loaded the Reo car and went to Wichita Falls,
Texas, where the government was building an aviation camp to
train flyers for the war that was still going on.  Papa hired on
as a carpenter at six dollars a day.

Let me tell you about one night when some of us green-horn
country boys went to downtown Wichita Falls with Papa.  While he
was attending to some business, we boys got out of the car and
were looking at newspapers out in front of a drug store.  It must
have been a Saturday night because the newsracks were full of
Sunday funny papers.

We were keeping hands off and just seeing what we could see
without touching the papers when a stranger came by and told us,
"You boys can have all the funny papers you want.  They only want
the newspapers.  Help yourselves to all you want."

Boy!  We were sure pleased to hear that.  I was beginning to
believe that city life was much more interesting than the country
life we were used to.  The funnies were just what we wanted.  And
we were getting more than our share when a friend, Harry Stacy,
came along and informed us that, "If you boys don't want to get
put in jail, you better put those papers back in the racks and
get in that car in a hurry."  We did what he told us to do.

Harry was one of Frank's buddies.  He and Frank were carpentering
out at the aviation camp.  As far as I was concerned, I respected
Harry and I knew he had almost as much authority to spank us boys
as Frank had.  At least he was concerned about our well-being.
We didn't know that a stranger would lie like that to country
kids just to see them get into trouble.

Anyway, while Papa carpentered we lived in a tent--and it rained
and rained and rained, week after week.  Our tent didn't leak
from the top, but it might as well have.  Water soaked the ground
and came up in our tent as out of an artesian well.  Everything
was wet.  You could almost wring water out of the air in our
tent.

Mama had taken about all she thought she could.  She wanted to go
home to our farm at Abbie.  So Papa loaded us all up and drove
all one Saturday night.  We arrived at the farm about daybreak.
We hurried to get unloaded so Papa could drive back to Wichita
Falls Sunday and be there ready to work Monday morning.

But Mama didn't want to be on the Abbie farm without Papa there.
Of course he couldn't stay because he just had to make a living
for us.  He had to go back.  So we all loaded back into the car
and drove all day, back to the wet tent in a pasture about a
half-
mile from where Papa was carpentering.

When it didn't rain so much, we boys walked from our tent to
nearby farms and picked cotton.  We got to making so much money
in the cotton patch that our parents reasoned that we all,
working together in the cotton patch, could do much better than
we could with the family split up, some picking cotton and Papa
carpentering.

Knowing that the cotton crops were good in parts of Oklahoma, we
got ready and headed for Duncan.  Before we got there we saw that
the cotton was really good--fields were white beyond our
expectations.  Many people were in war work and there was a
shortage of laborers for the harvest.

But before we got to where we were going, we lost a suitcase off
one front fender and hadn't noticed it was gone.  The loss was
discovered by one of the older boys when we stopped for one of
the little ones to hide behind a bush.  Naturally, we couldn't
just drive on and leave the suitcase.  We had to go back and find
it.  And about five miles back down the road we found it hanging
on a fence post.

It seemed we were always stopping for bushes and culverts.  I was
twelve years old and there were three others in the car who were
younger.  And no two little kids ever have to "go" at the same
time.  So it was stop here for one and stop there for another
one.  Lucky for us, we had to stop for another one before the
suitcase got many miles behind.

There were no service stations with fancy restrooms in those
days-
-only greasy garages with gasoline pumps out in front on the
curbs and two-holers out back by the alley, all of which were
dirty and smelly.  Bushes along the road were much more sanitary.

However, I remember one garage that had indoor plumbing.  Years
ago, when I was just a little kid nine years old, Papa had gone
to a garage to get the carburetor adjusted on his car.  Joel and
I went with him.  And since it took the mechanic more than 15
minutes to do the work it was a good thing there was a place for
little boys to hide.

The nice man working on our car must have been a little boy
himself at one time or another, or maybe he had little boys of
his own.  At any rate, when he saw us whispering something in
Papa's ear, the man pointed to the stairway leading up to a
storeroom, in one corner of which was a little boy's room.

Yes, we found the room all right--and we used "the thing" in the
room.  But then we had a little trouble figuring out how to
operate the thing.  There was a wall-tank six-feet high on the
wall, with a lever extending outward from the top of it and a
long cord hanging down from the lever.  We couldn't figure
anything else to do, so we tried pulling on the cord.  That was
the secret--it worked.  Water came down from the wall-tank into
the bowl with a world of fury and gusto and noise.

Now we had another problem--should we have pulled the cord?  We
began to wish we had not.  The bowl was filling up fast.  We
couldn't stop the flow of water.  True, we had pulled on the cord
to start it, but we couldn't push up on the cord to stop it.  The
bowl was almost full now and the water showed no signs of
stopping.

Just before the bowl ran over we ran downstairs.  We looked back,
expecting to see the water come flowing down through the upstairs
floor, or maybe down the stairway.  But it didn't run over.  We
had gotten scared all for nothing.  It was years later that we
learned about indoor plumbing having automatic cutoffs on the
water supply to the bowls.

Now getting back to our trip--before we found a farmer who needed
us, one tooth broke off the ring gear in the differential of our
car.  We were familiar with the sound--it had happened before.
But we drove on, listening to the click, click, in the car's rear
end every time the wheels went around.  Soon it ceased to be a
click, click, and became a wham, wham.  That meant there were two
teeth off.  It sounded bad; we couldn't go on.

With the differential sounding like it might go to pieces at any
minute, we decided that perhaps this was the cotton country we
had been searching for.  So we spotted a large patch of white
cotton and inquired about picking it.  The man said he didn't
need hands, but he thought Mr. Hammond wanted some pickers.  He
lived about three miles on down the road.

We phoned Mr. Hammond and found that we were in luck.  He wanted
us, and we certainly needed him.  He brought a team of mules and
towed our car to his place.  We unloaded and began picking
immediately, and before nightfall we had gathered hundreds of
pounds of cotton.

Papa caught a ride to Durant the next day and ordered a ring gear
for the car.  Before we had finished picking Mr. Hammond's cotton
the gear came by mail.  Papa jacked up the car, crawled under and
made the repair right there in the cotton field by our camp.

When we finished that patch, there were other fields waiting for
us.  We were making from $30 to $40 a day.  The work was hard but
we didn't mind.  We were finally getting a little money ahead.

I was twelve, and even at that age, I enjoyed helping the family
do what I knew had to be done.  I was growing up.  I was picking
more cotton in a day than I had ever picked before.  I enjoyed
figuring how much I picked and how much money I was making.  I
knew it wouldn't be my money, but I found pleasure in knowing how
much I was adding to the family income.

We quit picking cotton in time to get to Lamesa before Christmas.
We didn't go by our farm at Abbie, but went west into the Texas
panhandle.  Then we turned south to our Lamesa farm.

All in all it was an easy trip.  One stretch of road in Oklahoma
was through sandy post oak country.  Some of the trees were
fairly large, otherwise the land was like Texas shinnery.  The
county road didn't go through the worst of the sand but detoured
many miles out of the way to go around it.  In some places the
sand was higher than our car top.  One man who owned some of the
sandiest land had a road through his pasture so people could cut
through and save many miles.  He had built wooden runways over
the sand hills so cars could travel easily.  He charged a toll of
one dollar for each car.  We paid the toll and saved a good many
miles.

And then, of course we came to the Red River that forms the
boundary between Oklahoma and Texas.  Now, in that part of the
country there is just one way to get from Oklahoma to Texas and
that is to cross the river.  And I don't know of anyone who would
choose to stay in Oklahoma if he had a chance to go to Texas.
And that included us.  So we crossed the river.

I remember, there was a long, long bridge made of wood.  It never
occurred to me at the time just why it was made of wood instead
of concrete, this perhaps because I had never seen a concrete
bridge, and didn't know at that time they would have such things
in my lifetime.  Anyway, there was this nice bridge across the
big muddy river.  And about 200 yards down stream from the
bridge, there was a road where people could cross the river in
the mud and shallow water if they wanted to.

Now the next thing I knew, we were down there in that muddy road
while all the other cars were zipping across on the bridge.  I
wondered why we didn't ride across on the bridge.  We didn't even
ride across the river--well, yes, the driver rode--that was Papa,
but the rest of us didn't ride.  Papa was smart.  He was not only
smart, he was the only one who could drive the car.  The rest of
us didn't walk, either, we ran and pushed.  Part of the time we
were running and trying to keep up.  The rest of the time we were
pushing, trying to keep the car from stopping and sinking into
the quicksand.

I think the bridge we didn't cross on was a toll bridge.  My
memory doesn't tell me it was a toll bridge, but by way of
reasoning I can only conclude that it was.  Otherwise, why would
we Johnsons have been down there pushing in the mud when other
cars were crossing on the bridge?  And why did that man at the
bridge show Papa how to get down to that muddy road?  Why
wouldn't he let us cross on the bridge like the other cars were
doing?  Yes, it all adds up, that must have been a toll bridge.

But we didn't pay the toll.  And we had very little trouble
crossing on the low road.  Matter of fact, we didn't even stop,
that is, Papa didn't, except for us to catch up and load back
into the car.  We saved our money and lost very little time.

When we got into the Texas panhandle, we headed south toward
Lamesa.  We stayed awhile with Susie and Dode and then went on to
the rented farm at Abbie.

It was the end of the year now, and time to re-rent the Abbie
place for another year or give it up.  We gave it up and moved
back to the farm at Lamesa.  We moved west the first time by
railroad.  We went this time in two wagons.  It was January, 1919
and the weather was cold.

If I had known then what I know now, I think I might have asked
my parents how this wagon trip compared with another cold January
21 years ago when the Johnsons moved back to Texas from Oklahoma
in wagons.  At least this time we were not driving a herd of
cattle, only one old milk cow.  And the weather wasn't all that
cold.

I guess the coldest night was the one we spent in an old rundown
schoolhouse, after chasing the skunks and roadrunners out.  It
was somewhere in the bad lands near Gail.  The next morning it
was almost too cold to travel.  After going a few miles we
stopped and got around behind Gail Mountain out of the cold wind,
and built a fire to warm by.




CHAPTER 9

BACK TO OUR LAMESA FARM IN 1919; SCHOOL AT BALLARD

So we moved back to our big farm near Lamesa and farmed there in
1919.  Susie and Dode moved to Hamlin.  They quit farming and
Dode got a job in town.

After those two dry years on the plains, there seemed to be more
coyotes than ever, at least we saw more of them.  The drought and
hunters had taken their toll of rabbits and I guess it was harder
for the coyotes to find something to eat.  They would come almost
to our barnyard in broad daylight in search of food.  Old Scotch
managed to keep them away from our chickens, but he was no match
for two or three of them at one time off out in the pasture, and
he was wise enough to know it.

I have seen him chase a lone coyote a few hundred yards away from
our house, but then that one would join another one and the two
of them would chase Old Scotch back into our yard.  Then with us
to back him up, he would chase them away again.  When there were
more than one, they made the dog stay in his place.

Now I guess you are wondering why we didn't shoot the coyotes
when they came that close.  The answer is simple.  Coyotes are
not stupid.  They can tell a boy from a man, and they can also
tell whether or not the boy has a gun.  They simply would not
come that close to a big boy with a gun.  We kids had guns but
they were small 22 caliber.  They were too small for coyotes.
And besides, the powder in the shells at that time was nothing
like as powerful as the powder we use today.

We four boys had our own guns and naturally Papa had his.  Albert
was the youngest of us four.  He had a gun by the time he was ten
and he killed his share of rabbits, prairie dogs and
rattlesnakes.

You see, we did a lot of target practice with our guns.
Sometimes we would sit on our front porch and shoot nailheads in
the front yard fence.  We would also stand matches up in nail
holes in the fence and shoot the heads, striking the matches
without breaking the stems.  Shells cost us only eight cents for
a box of 50.

No one could deny that we were pretty good.  One man told that
Earl was so good with his rifle that we boys didn't climb trees
to pick peaches.  He said we other kids would walk around under
the trees with buckets and Earl would shoot the stems and let the
peaches fall into the buckets.  But Earl denied it, explaining
that we tried it but Papa made us quit because it bruised the
peaches when they fell.

Now Joel was a year-and-a-half older than I, and no question
about it, he was a smart boy.  He was almost as smart as I was.
But he was so good-looking the girls wouldn't leave him alone.
So he sort of drifted away from his smartness and concentrated on
dressing well and looking good.  He wound up selling men's
clothing, and later on, insurance.  But when he was a boy on the
farm at Lamesa, I remember he made a windmill.  I mean this was a
windmill to remember.  He set it up on a tower and made it pump
water.  And he made a real cylinder out of a piece of pipe, with
two leather valves attached to two wooden spools.  One spool
moved up and down, the other one was stationary at the lower end
of the pipe.  When the wind blew the mill would pump water from a
can that was buried in the ground, up through a little pipe, out
through another pipe and into a small watering trough.  The mill
must have been about two or three feet tall, tower and all.  And
the water it pumped would water a herd of about 20 tiny little
imaginary cows.

Joel also made a submarine out of a piece of two-by-four lumber.
He drilled a hole through it from one end to the other for a
rubber-band motor.  It would dive to the bottom of the water
trough, circle around about one time and then float back up to
the surface for a rewind.  He could set the sheet-iron fins in
different positions and make it cut di-dos in several different
ways.

I remember the mail car that came up to Lamesa daily from Big
Spring.  And naturally it had to go back daily or else it
wouldn't be there to come up again the next day.  Be that as it
may, besides hauling mail it also hauled passengers when there
were any who wanted to be hauled.  It was a seven-passenger car.
And by placing a board across the jump seats, it could carry nine
passengers with ease, all of them inside the car.

And what are jump seats?  Big cars had a lot of room between the
front seat and the back seat, somewhat like your living room at
home.  Jump seats were two in number and they folded down into
the back of the front seat.  They could be used if needed, or
folded down to give more room, when not needed.

Now there's nothing unusual about a mail car carrying mail
between two towns, nor about carrying passengers along with the
mail.  The point to notice here is the segregation of passengers
according to color and race at that date in our history.  Some
were not allowed to ride inside the car with those who were
commonly called "whites."

When there was a Negro or a Mexican passenger, he or she had to
ride on a seat on the running board and hold onto the windshield
post to stay on.  If there was one "white," one Negro and one
Mexican, there would be one riding in the car and one on each
running board.  The driver really had no choice in the matter.
It was not his fault.  It was the law of tradition--or, the law
of justice working in reverse.

We used that mail car once to bring a part for our car.  We had
planned a trip to Hamlin and on the day before we were to go, the
car broke a tooth off the ring gear in the differential.  The
garage man in Lamesa phoned Big Spring for a new gear.  The parts
man said he had the gear in stock and he would get it on the mail
car that very day.  It would be in Lamesa by noon, he promised.

Well, the mail car came but the gear didn't.  Nor did it come the
next day.  They phoned Big Spring again and learned that the man
who took the order for the gear had become sick suddenly and was
rushed to the hospital before he could write up the order.  We
finally got the gear, Papa made the repair, and we went to Hamlin
three days late.

Now this was no big deal-no great big story here.  But a boy
remembers a thing like this when he is 13 years old and he wanted
to go to Hamlin three days ago.

I remember another time when we made a trip to Hamlin running on
an old tire that was swelled up and about to blow out.  Rather,
i

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