I was born on June 11,1913 in a log cabin at the head of Mountain Creek, about 6 miles outside of Rutherfordton, North Carolina. My daddy and mama already had one girl, Louise, who was nearly two years old, and I was their first boy. They went on to have three more girls and five more boys.

My mama said I was the ugliest baby she ever saw. She said she was ashamed to carry me anywhere. People would be talking about pretty babies, and she would tell that about me. I bet I heard her say that a dozen times while I was growing up.

After I was grown up I could see that I favored my mama and her side of the family. Maybe that was the reason she thought I was ugly, though I’ve heard folks say that she was good looking.

It was so cold when I was born that my daddy said he had to wear a coat while he harvested winter wheat that day.

My earliest memory is of a big washout we had in this part of the state, in the summer of 1916, when I was 3 years old. My daddy took Louise and me down to the barn to see the water that was flooding out into the bottoms. It looked like a river. Old logs and sticks and stuff were floating in the water. It was a mess. Lots of houses on the Broad River were washed away. My Uncle Rob had a house on the Broad River, and one room of his house and his hog pen was washed away.

I was shy. One day my Uncle Reid Higgins came to see us. I got behind the door and I stayed there till he left. I was just that way. We were living out in the sticks and you did not see many people. So when someone came, I would run and hide.

There were 4 old folks living with us Aunt Julie, Uncle John, and his sisters, Aunt Lizzie and Aunt Crissie. Aunt Julie and Uncle John raised Mama. Mama’s daddy got killed at a shingle mill when she was real young.

Aunt Crissie and Aunt Lizzie were both old maids. Aunt Lizzie was married for a few days one time when she was young, and then she come back home. She married a Frazier but she never even changed her name. Aunt Lizzie and Aunt Crissie had a little log house that they lived in right down by our house.

Uncle John and Aunt Julie, Lizzie, and Crissie were all under Daddy’s care. When Daddy and Mama moved over to the White place they went with the understanding that my dad would inherit the hundred-acre property in return for looking after them. A lot of the hundred acres was under cultivation, a lot of it was in timber, a lot of it was waste. The hundred acres included two old houses. The understanding was that as long as the old people were still alive Daddy would be there to help them. They needed a man to get them medicine, see that the wood was got up, to do what they couldn’t do and whatever else they needed.

Daddy bought a one-stroke, hit-and-miss gas engine to run a circular saw for cutting wood. The engine would fire one turn, miss the next. It would go put-put,

put-put-put, put-put-put-put-put-put-put, and not whirr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr.

He sawed all the firewood and stove wood we needed and took care of Aunt

Crissie and Aunt Lizzie too. The saw and engine were mounted on some wheels, and he pulled the saw to town with a mule so he could cut wood for Uncle Huntley and Aunt Maybelle and their family.

Daddy didn’t have to do a lot for Aunt Julie, Lizzie, and Crissie until they took to their deathbeds. Before that they done for themselves. I can't remember much about their deaths. But my sister Ellen slept with Aunt Julie. Aunt Julie died in her sleep and Ellen did not know about it until she got up the next morning.

Mama and Daddy had Louise, me, Ellen, Beatrice, Martin, and Reid while we were living over there. We were each born about two years apart. There wasn’t any doctor coming to the house and delivering any babies. All I know is that while we were living at the White place there came to be a houseful of us.

After we moved to the big house on Maple Creek Road, Mama had Sue, Charles, Yates, and Don - making ten of us in all.

All of us kids were expected to help take care of each other. We helped see after each other. From the time we were small we were expected to take care of the little ones as well as do chores ourselves. We took turns with our chores. One of us usually brought in stove wood for one week, and the next week then another one of us would do it. Louise helped in the kitchen with the cooking more than any of the other of us.

We cooked with a wood stove that had a reservoir for heating water so you had hot water for washing dishes. We had that type of wood stove after Thelma and me were married and had children.

From the time I was about 4 years old, I would walk down to Aunt Lizzie and Aunt Crissie’s log cabin. It was about 300 yards from our house. They were in their 70s and 80s back then.

I would go get in their kitchen cupboard, where they would have biscuits and fried out meat that they had fixed for breakfast, usually pork that was left laying in the grease it was cooked in. Boy it was good! They didn’t have an icebox, so they had to eat whatever meat they had cooked that day. One of them would stand beside me when I got into the cupboard. Or I would go to a cabinet where they would have chewing tobacco and a knife. I would go get a whetstone and clean their knife for them. The chewing tobacco would stick on that knife. I thought I was sharpening it. At least I was trying to help. They had a spinning wheel that they used to make thread, and I enjoyed watching them turn that wheel.

We had chickens out in the yard running loose. They were just like pets. Every day late in the afternoon before the chickens would go to roost, Mama would fix up some ground corn meal like you make bread out of it, and we would wet it and make a little ball of it. She would throw it down, and the chickens would jump on it and eat it in a hurry.

We had cats that were just around. Daddy had an old possum dog, a red bone hound, but we didn’t call him a pet. All of us kids just ignored him. We’d feed him with scraps.

We called our house the White place because it had belonged to John and Julie White. Aunt Julie White was Mama’s mother’s sister. Mama’s mother died when Mama was little, so Aunt Julie took Mama to raise her.

Our house had three rooms made from big old logs that were hewed out. Some of the logs were 18 inches in diameter. They wasn’t any grass around the house.

Later Dad framed a shed on the side of the house that we used for the dining room and kitchen. He took rough planks that he used for the walls and roof, and it didn’t have no insulation. Some of the boards were real warped and bowed. It was not sealed on the inside at all.

One year it come up a big snow. The boards on the kitchen wall were so bucked up that when it snowed it blowed in. It was about the same temperature in the kitchen as it was outside. Enough snow came through to be a foot high on the kitchen table. Mama had a coconut shell that she put salt in, and when she picked it up and it was full of snow.

The roof of the house was made of homemade split oak shingles. The chimney had a gutter running right down from it between two sides of the main roof. The kitchen was boxed up with boards and the roof was made of boards. It was just the same kind of roof you cover a cow barn except our house had a floor.

We had some places on the roof that needed patching. Starting when I was about 5 years old, I would go with my daddy to the woods to make shingles. He picked out an oak tree that he knew would split good. He chopped it down and then he split out shingles that we took back to use for repairing the roof.

One day when I was 5 years old, the roof of the house caught on fire. A spark blew out of the chimney and landed on one of those shingles. I was at Aunt Crissie and Lizzie's when the fire started and I saw the flames and went running up to where I could see real good what was going on. My mama grabbed a big washtub that was filled with water, and carried it up into the loft. Then she climbed out the window on to the shed roof, and set the tub under the overhang of the roof underneath the gutter. The flames were 3 or 4 feet high by then. She started throwing dippers of water up on that fire. Whatever water was wasted would come back down the gutter into the tub. She just kept on till she put out that fire. If she hadn’t discovered it for another 5 minutes, the house would have burned down. It wasn’t much of a house, but it was all we had. There was no man around there to help put out that fire, it was just Mama and the children. She put it out. She saved the house.

We mostly had wheat straw mattresses and on top of those we had feather beds to sleep on. They made a bag out of heavy cloth that they stuffed with wheat straw. After we slept on it a night or two, it would have the imprint of our body on it. So they would have to regularly fluff up the mattress. That kind of bedding was good places for chinches. They were bed bugs, sort of like a dog tick. They would crawl around on us at night and bite us. When they would be biting, we wouldn’t get much sleep. They would just torment us.

Mama would tear the bed apart and take the homemade wood frame bed outside piece by piece. She would take the mattress and feather bed out in the yard. She would pour boiling water anywhere that a chinch could hide in the wood frame. The boiling would kill them things.

The outhouse was a good piece down from the house at the end of the garden. They didn’t dig a hole for outhouses back then. They built an outhouse on a slope - that was where you could just go sit down.

About fifty feet from the house, we had a well where you had to go to draw your water with a wooden drum that had a metal crank driven into the end of the drum. As you turned the handle on the crank it would turn the drum and bring up the bucket of water. The drum was mounted between two planks so the rope would wind up evenly. I would draw buckets of water and carry them back to the house. We didn’t take much water to bathe in when we had to carry all our water from the well.

Our barn was another fifty feet down beyond the well. More than once I carried an empty bucket from the house down to the well and walked on to the barn before I realized where I was supposed to be going.

At the White place we also had a smokehouse where we would salt down our meat and keep it during the winter. I remember when my dad taught me how to shoot a rifle. We were sitting on the back porch steeps, looking at the smokehouse and I was shooting at an old toolbox that was no longer any good. There was just room enough between the house and the smokehouse to drive a wagon through.

We didn’t have a field for the cow to graze. So we had to tie it to a stake with a rope on it, then take the cow to the creek to drink, and then move the stake to a new spot where there was something for it to eat. If there ever was a piece of barbed wire on the old White place I never saw it.

We grew our own wheat to make biscuits and our own corn to bake cornbread. We had our own cow for milk and to make our butter. We would let that milk clabber, and we would make butter. We would have biscuits and molasses and stove wood gravy. Some folks would call that cream gravy.

We raised 2 or 3 hogs every year that we would eat, chickens for eggs and to eat. We made our own butter, buttermilk, bread, cornbread, bacon, hog lard, beefsteaks, hamburger. We killed a beef every year. We would rub a little salt on the side meats to cure the beef. We would also can sausage balls. Daddy raised all the meat we needed for the bunch of us.

We had a garden along the side of the house. We grew all kinds of vegetables - corn, beans, cabbage, squash, beets, tomatoes. We canned vegetables from the garden. We also wrapped apples up in paper and kept them under the beds so we would have apples to eat during the winter.

Daddy would ride a mule to the general store to buy staples, sugar, coffee, salt. When he went he would also swap eggs to get tobacco and snuff.

Once Daddy wanted to kill a beef, and he got a colored man to help him. We tied the bull up so we could shoot him and kill him. The man shot the bull with a rifle, but the shot wasn’t good - he made a wrong shot, and the bull broke loose and run away. They had to chase him down. Next thing I knew they had him down and were dressing him.

The first time I saw my grandpa, Martin Devault Hill, I was about 4 or 5 years old. He was sitting up in a straight chair, leaning back against a brick kiln. Grandpa was about the size of my brother Reid, about five and a half-foot tall, but he wore a moustache.

We never had many clothes but we had enough to keep warm. We never needed something to eat and not have it. We never went to bed hungry. There’s plenty of folks that can’t say that.

Grandpa was a brick maker. Over on the branch where Lona Hill Hicks now lives, there was good clay and they made a lot of brick then. He made the brick for Piedmont Church that was build in 1914. The old bricks at Piedmont Church were later covered with new bricks.

Sometime after that, someone said, "Your grandpa is dead." It was 1918 and I was just 5 years old. We went over to where they lived. We called it the big house, and I remember seeing him in a coffin in the parlor room. They kept the dead at home then. The undertaker would come out and put them in a room where people could see them. That was the first time I saw someone who was dead. That room was the same one that my first child Joann was born in.

When the 1918 flu epidemic came through, Dave Sims told how he took food to somebody’s house because they were so sick they couldn’t come out. He put the food on the porch because he was afraid to go in.

When the First World War ended that year my Dad went out in the yard and yelled to the Lewis family who lived about a quarter of a mile away. They had land above us and land below us. He had got the word and he wanted to let them know. Daddy just wanted to let them know as quick as he could that the war was over. He could have got a horse and rode up there, but that wouldn’t have been quick enough.

My daddy was very religious. My mother was quiet, she didn’t say much about her religious beliefs.

Daddy wanted to go to church whenever the church door was open. My mother didn’t want to go as much. If Mama had an excuse, like somebody was coming for dinner, she would stay home from church. Daddy was so outgoing he would invite folks from church home for dinner unexpected.

Daddy tried to have devotions every day. Mama didn’t take a leading part in that but would always be there. Daddy would talk to some of us kids, and if I’m not mistaken, Reid and Don were saved at home.

We’d ride mules and go to Mountain Creek Church, just me and Daddy. It was through the woods where the wild life run. Daddy was on one mule and I was on another. They had hitching posts where we tied our mules when we got there.

Other times Daddy would drive all of us in a wagon with two mules way over 5 miles so we could get to Piedmont Baptist Church. This was his home church. Piedmont Baptist Church came out of Pleasant Hill Baptist Church because that was too far away for people living here on Maple Creek to go to.

My sisters and brothers and I would play church. Someone would be the preacher. You had to imitate something back then and we played church. The entertainment had to come from ourselves - not TV.

Mama was good to us. She might not have showed it emotionally. But she would see that we had something clean to wear. My daddy only had about one outfit to wear to church, and Mama would lay his clothes out on the bed for him. And he would put on what she laid out.

Daddy would sometimes bring a visiting preacher home with him for dinner. Sometimes he would even bring a visiting preacher home to stay with us for a whole week, and I never heard Mama complain.

If any man ever loved people, my daddy did. He would get acquainted with people easier than anybody I ever saw. If you walked in the house, he would find out who you were, where you came from, who your kinfolk were. He had a gift of getting to know people and of making people like him.

Daddy was always there for me. If everybody had a dad like him, the world would be a lot better off.

I cannot remember my daddy or mama hugging or kissing me or telling me that they loved me. They didn’t display affection. I don’t remember Mama hugging any of the rest of my brothers and sisters. I can’t remember sitting in my mother’s lap. When you got 10 children, there’s not much lap sitting done. When you got 10 children and 3 or 4 old folks, you got a lot to do to put food on the table for that many people every day.

I think a hug pays off. Even when I was in my sixties I was working myself to death. It’s a wonder I didn’t kill myself working so hard. Looking back, I regret that I didn’t take my kids to more things. I never took them to ball games. The only places I ever took them to was church and to the doctor. I was working too hard but I had too.

I know my mama and daddy did love each other. They were happy together.

But they didn’t show it to each other. Neither one of my parents was overbearing. When it comes to being rough on your children, we were not mistreated.

Somehow or other, maybe because I was a boy too I was always closer to my dad. The Bible says, "Honor your father and mother - and your days will be long on the earth." I always honored my father and mother, and my days have been long and good.

We have an old picture taken at the White place of us kids from Reid on up - Daddy had a photographer come over and take our pictures. I was down in the field, I had been working with 2 mules and a drag harrow when they came down and got me so they could take that picture.

After I got big enough and it was hoeing season, Daddy would take us kids out to the cornfield. My sisters and I would carry some hoes and we’d try to hoe the grass and weeds out around the cornstalks. We’d come in at lunchtime and eat cornbread and vegetables. Some times Mama would go out to the smoke house and cut off a piece of meat to go with the vegetables. After lunch we would all lay down on the porch and rest for about an hour and then go back out and hoe some more. I couldn’t have been worth much in the field at that age - I just remember that good eating.

Another day Daddy and us kids were hoeing in a cornfield a long way from the house. It was in the heat of the day and we were starving. Mama came with cornbread with homemade butter on it. That was the best cornbread I have ever had.

We played pranks on one another. I put Beattie up to pushing Martin off into the creek. She waited till Martin walked along the creek bank, but when she pushed him Martin grabbed hold of her and they both fell in.

Daddy liked to play with us kids. Any kind of game that we would play, he would join in. Any time he could, he’d pass baseball with you. If you had a dozen people around he would get up a game.

When my daddy was a teenager, he went to Round Hill School in Union Mills, way on up beyond Gilkey, and he played baseball on a team. In school, everyone played baseball, and he was one of them. It was 15 miles from where he lived, and he would ride his mule up there. It was a boarding school and he would stay up there all week. He had to go that far to get more education. He couldn’t get that type of education here in Rutherfordton. Seventh grade was as far as you could go in Rutherfordton at that time. He was in the 8^th grade - which would probably be more like high school now.

Back when Daddy was a boy, he liked to play pranks too. He had 9 brothers and sisters in his family too. The way he told us, they ran wild and they had to make their own entertainment. One day they come in to eat, and the table was set. Most of the time they had milk to drink but that time they had water poured. One boy picked up his glass and throwed it in the next one’s face. So he took his glass of water, and threw it in the next one’s face. It went all around the table. Aunt Dora was making bread at the end of the table. When she got water thrown at her, she took some buttermilk she had for making bread and she threw it back. They had to clean up the table before they could eat.

They didn’t have screens on the doors. One day a chicken came into the house, wandered around, and hopped up the stairs to the bedroom. Uncle Eb was sitting on the bed, and when the chicken walked by, he grabbed it, wrung its neck, and tossed it out the window into the yard. Grandpa was out in the woods right then hunting rabbits. He came up on some wild chickens, and with one shot he got two. Aunt Dora had already killed two chickens for dinner. So Aunt Dora had five chickens to dress for dinner.

Mama would have fainting spells. Dad being gone to work all the time was hard on her. They would have a little bit of camphor around and they would wave it under her nose where she would have to breathe it and she would wake up. Sometimes when I woke up in the morning Mama would be out on the front porch with a bad headache throwing up. She had a lot of headaches, migraines or what, I don’t know. She was a nervous type person, would cry over nothing.

I don’t know why anybody wouldn’t have a fishhook but I remember when I was 6 years old my mother took me fishing. We went down to the creek and she took a straight pin and bent it and tied it to a string. Then she got her a pole. She fished in a hole there where she had seen some fish. When the fish would get hold of the pin, she would give the pole a jerk and land the fish up on the bank. She caught a fish or two and brought them back up to the house and cooked them for us.

We were down on the branch working one day when Daddy’s possum dog caught a chicken and killed it. Daddy broke a limb of a bush and whipped the dog. Later it killed another chicken, and Daddy seen that there was something wrong with the dog. So he put him up into an empty corncrib. When he let him out of the crib after a day or two, the dog took off heading toward town, the same way he would follow Dad to work. So Dad went up to the Harris place to use the telephone and he called a friend of his, Bud Miller, who lived up near town and warned him. Sure enough, that dog came up through there in a while and Bud shot him. When they sent the dog’s head to Raleigh, it came back that that dog had rabies. When Dad heard that, he tore that crib down and burned it.

Uncle John died in 1919. He may have been just been old or he may have got sick, I don’t know. They put his body in a pine casket in the house. I don't remember any kind of service.

They used mule hearses back then to take caskets to cemeteries, but we just used a wagon that Daddy had built. It had a homemade bed with iron wheels and wooden spokes that our 2 mules pulled.

They put the casket on the wagon and hooked up the mules. We drove the wagon up to Gilkey where we buried him in the family plot. The cemetery was out in the woods, and about 3 or 4 miles from the White place. We drove those mules and wagon through the woods till we found the cemetery, and we buried him. They already had the grave dug. There was about 6 of us that went; it wasn’t much of a crowd.

A few days later Daddy and I got some hog wire and went back up there to Uncle John’s grave. We put up posts around the grave, and then strung the hog wire to it to keep the wild animals away.

Uncle John was one of the last ones of the family that we buried in there. Aunt Crissie and Aunt Lizzie died in the late ‘20s and they were the last ones we buried there.

Shortly after Uncle John died, we put a rock up for Uncle John at the cemetery. It was a marble stone that the government gave for him serving in the Civil War. It’s upright. Most of the graves up there didn’t have stones. They just have rocks. His brother up there has a stone too, I don’t remember how he died, a mule kicked him, I think.

The next time I was at that family cemetery was over 35 years ago with Helen. About 20 years ago I went with Helen and Ralph and Joann and David. There were still signs of that hog wire.

In the summer of 2000, we went up to the cemetery where Uncle John and Aunt Crissie and Lizzie were buried. We drove up 221 to Gilkey. We turned right just before the lumberyard, crossed the railroad and beared left with the main road. We took the first right and went a short way on the right. The graves are in the upper corner of the cemetery. We drove up to a house that was near there.

When we told the man at that house what we were there for, he asked if we would like for him to take us up to the cemetery. We said we would and he went up there with us. I was so pleased with how helpful he was that later on I invited him and his family to go out to eat with us when they came to Rutherfordton. I told him it was because I wanted to do something for him for the kindness he showed us, so I took him and his family out to eat at Dockside. I don’t believe he had ever took anybody up there to the cemetery before. We would never have found the cemetery if he hadn’t gone with us.

In 1920 Daddy would ride a mule to Spindale to help build Stonecutter Mill. He was a carpenter like his brothers. A lot of them Hill boys, that’s all they ever done was carpentry work.

Daddy was a skilled carpenter even when I was too small to remember. Daddy had a head for carpentering. He could look at a roof and have you tell him how high you wanted the pitch to be. Let’s say you wanted a 4x12 pitch, go up four feet for every twelve feet you go over. There’s a lot of numbers on a framing square, and he knew how to read them. He could cut the notches with a framing square, and the rafters would fit just like they were supposed to.

Carpentry at Spindale Mill was one of the last jobs he had before he came down with tuberculosis. He worked himself so hard that he broke down. The doctor said he would never work again. The doctor told him to sleep outside to help his health.

We had a narrow porch on the house. Daddy put chicken wire around the porch to keep the dogs out, and he would sleep out there to try to build his health up. He slept on a cot, an old metal thing that folded up. The porch wasn’t big enough hardly for that cot. His health did get better though. He was a lot stronger a year or two after that. He slept there a long time.

With Daddy being sick, they took up a collection at Piedmont Church and people put in thirty-seven dollars. Daddy told the church that he never had money that lasted such a long time.

A Rawleigh salesman came by around that time selling medicines and other things. This salesman sold Rawleigh products for a long time and then later worked at the Post Office. Daddy decided that he would try selling some Rawleigh products too. He let me go with him a couple of times when he was going to be overnight. He would take a picnic lunch the first day we went out. He would always read the Bible when we stopped for lunch. People would take us in to spend the night.

There were lots of different Rawleigh products, not just the medicines. There was pepper, spices, flavorings, puddings and other products. I wish I had an order sheet to show all the different products.

The products came in on the railroad to Ruth. They were packed in wooden boxes. The freight was unloaded at the Depot and then they would load it up for you when you went to pick it up. The train ran right against the side of the depot building.

When Daddy went out to sell Rawleigh products he would drive mules pulling a wagon. He would stop at someone’s house, and they would talk about everything, but the Bible was always the main thing in the conversation. He carried his Bible everywhere he went.

I thought he would just try to sell Rawleigh products, but that wasn’t the way he did it. Just before he would go to leave, he would ask them if they needed any medicine or any other products and they usually would.

People would say that they wanted some medicine but they didn’t have any money. He would swap medicine for chickens and eggs. He knew what a chicken would bring and he carried a hand scale to weigh them. Then he’d take what he got on to the market. He had standing places where he would sell them. A restaurant back then, Mr. Taylor’s Restaurant and Bus Stop, was one of the places where Dad would take a lot of his chickens and eggs. Mr. Taylor would cook them for the people who stopped there. Daddy would also sell chickens to the Isothermal Hotel.

Daddy would swap Rawleigh products for just anything that he could turn into cash or that we could eat. Back then we also raised chickens and Dad would take them to town and sell them to get some money.

My dad believed in work. He never complained about getting up early and going to bed late. He’d work all day and come home after dark. He would die or make an honest living, one. No matter what he was doing, he would always leave before daylight and come home after dark.

When Daddy was selling Rawleigh products, a dollar or two was all you could make in a day working as a laborer. He would sometimes come home with sales of 60 or 70 dollars - now that wasn’t all profits, but 30 or 40 was. That was a lot of money back then. And I remember him coming home once when he stopped by Lona’s and sold a bottle of salve to Uncle Jesse for 60 cents and that was all he made that trip.

At the White place, we lived at the end of the road, about a mile or more from the last house and you could not see that last house from our house. We could see someone coming in walking or on a horse or in a wagon - we never had any vehicles come in there. Just before we moved over to the big house, Dad bought an old model T Ford to sell his Rawleigh goods. But he used mules and a wagon at first. Then you could buy good car for about $4-500.

That model T Ford was the first car I drove. You didn’t have to have a license then to drive. There wasn’t many cars in the county. I was around 9 years old. He just put me in there and told me how it worked. You had to go around in the front of it and crank it. It was built up with a cloth top and it had 2 seats.

Daddy had a wooden chicken box mounted on the front of the car. Reid tells how some of the grain that had been fed to the chickens fell down and before long there was corn spouting from around the radiator.

After my grandfather Martin Hill died, my grandmother Mary Keeter Hill and my Aunt Dora moved to Spindale. They decided to sell the big house and Dad decided he wanted to buy it. Daddy was born in that house on Dec. 27^th, 1890. Seems like he gave about $4,000 for it and about 80 acres of land. We thought it was a lot of money.

When I was 9 years old I helped Daddy when he moved us over here to the big house. The Model T wasn’t big enough to move our stuff in. To move, we had to hook up a wagon. We loaded up the wagon and he handed me the lines to the mules and told me to drive over to the big house. I had to pull that wagon with a couple of young mules. They would run away with a snap of a finger if you didn’t watch out. I knew the road - we had been on it enough times. It was about 4 miles from the White place to the big house.

We moved our old cow, a few chickens, some bedsteads with straw and feather mattresses, dressers, a cupboard, and our clothes. We didn’t have much then. Uncle John Owens, Daddy's brother-in-law, was helping us move. Daddy would not whip a mule, and he got upset with Uncle John when he whipped the mule with a trace chain. The mule had balked and would not pull the wagon. It would just lay down and refuse to move and that is why Uncle John whipped it.

We tore down most of the house we lived in over at the White place and brought it to build a barn. It was really a shuck house. We saved the shucks off the corn and fed them to our cattle.

To keep food cold, we first had a cool box under the kitchen floor. It was behind the kitchen door. Later Daddy dug a cellar out by the garden just like he would dig a well. It was a round hole about 3-4 feet wide and 10-12 feet deep. It stayed about 55 degrees at the bottom. Daddy would store milk there along with any leftovers. We stored things in several buckets with lids on them and a handle for lifting it up and down. They were held with different strings.

In 1937 we got electricity. Woodrow Flynn and my brother Martin wired the big house. Woodrow Flynn also wired the house where I live now. Soon after we got electricity, Daddy bought an icebox. The Blueridge Ice Company would deliver ice once a week, selling it in 300 pound blocks. Bryan Whitesides and Arthur Gross delivered the ice. We thought we had it made when we got an icebox.

I think Dad bought his first refrigerator, a Leonard, a couple of years after we got married. At that time we kept milk in a spring to keep it cool.

So when we moved over here to the big house, the three old women, Aunt Julia, Aunt Crissie and Aunt Lizzie, moved over too and lived with us. Of the three aunts, Aunt Julia died first at the age of 76. Aunt Lizzie died next at the age of 86. Aunt Crissie, who lived to be 96, was the last of the aunts to die. Aunt Julia was buried at Mountain Creek but Uncle John, Aunt Lizzie and Aunt Crissie were buried at the family cemetery at either the Charles Aydlotte or Gilbert Edwards’s place in Gilkey.

Daddy inherited the White place for taking care of the old folks. Several years after we moved to the big house, Daddy sold 50 acres of the White place for $1,200 and he said it was the biggest check he had ever seen.

My dad had over a hundred dollars in the bank when the Great Depression hit. The banks busted all of a sudden, you didn’t have a chance to get it out. He came home and told us all his money was gone. He didn’t show that much emotion about it. Later on he got out about 20 percent of what he had had in the bank.

When my dad died, a thousand dollars was a lot of money. His estate was about $89,000, including his land.

I’d love to go back in there to the White place now but I’d be afraid to. I heard there was an old liquor still on the land which is now owned by a pulp wood company. Last time I went in there, I couldn’t find the home site because the area was so grown up.

After we moved over here and I was around 10 years old, I would drive the car to town. It wasn’t much of a town back then - you could probably have gone to town, drove all over and back home and never see another car. I would go get Aunt May Belle and Uncle Huntley Higgins in town to bring them out for Sunday dinner. Uncle Reid and Uncle Huntley were my mama’s brothers. Uncle Huntley and Aunt Maybelle would bring their kids nearly every Sunday to have dinner with us. After I was driving a car, Dad would send me and get them to bring them to dinner. I was a teenager, and they were closer to our family than the rest of Mama and Daddy’s brothers and sisters. They had kids, Charles and Polly. I would spend the night with Charles once in a while, but after we got grown we never got close much. Charles is still living - kind of shut-in who plays games on a computer all the time.

I didn’t have to have a license when I started out driving. The old Fords we had required a lot of attention and help to keep them going. The engine would start missing, and I’d have to take the spark plugs out and clean them off. Then I would put the spark plugs back in and get the car going again.

Daddy once swapped something he was selling for a worn out bicycle that he brought home for me. It was just a trap of a bicycle. I was around 12 years old I guess. It didn’t have no brakes on it. You had to put your foot back between the wheel and the frame to stop it. One day I was riding it into the garage - it was just a dirt floor, and was sloped down to a workbench. I missed getting my foot in to stop it, and I crashed into the workbench. It broke my front wheel from the handlebars - that was the end of that bicycle.

We had to get the mail down on the highway. The mailman was Clarence Butler, and he drove a horse and buggy. Back at that time, it was hard for a car to get around a lot of places where people lived, and that horse and buggy could go about anywhere. I liked going down to the mailbox, and picking up the mail and bring it up to my mama. Clarence delivered mail for a lot of years. He was a pleasant man, and everybody liked him.

Mama made a lot of our clothes. She sewed shirts for us out of feedbags. The folks who sold feed would use fancy looking cloth to help sell the feed. Then we’d unravel the seam out and make clothes out of the feedbags. In addition to making clothes, we used lots of plain white feedbags to make hand towels.

All our clothes was made of cotton, so we had to iron them. From the time I was 10 years old, I would iron with a heavy old-timey iron that we set in front of a fire or on a stove to heat it.

Mama made most of our clothes. She had a Singer sewing machine that was on four rollers. Mama used it out on the front porch, and rolled it in at night or covered it with a cloth. She had a lot of trouble with her legs, which made it hard for her to use the pedals.

She’d get started sewing by turning the wheel with her hand - which made the needle and the pedals go up and down. I sat on the floor beside her and as soon as the pedals began to move, I would start pedaling with my hands. She would tell me how fast to go. I liked doing it - I thought I was helping. She also got my brothers and sisters to pedal it for her. I don’t remember her telling one of us to do it, and us not doing it.

I just learned cooking a thing at a time. Even when I was growing up I could cook some things and make them fit to eat. We would take bacon grease and steam some cabbage, and boy did we ever want some more. I would fry home made side meat of hogs to get the grease and use the side meat to season what ever we were eating. I had to learn how to pressure-cook beans in order to can them. I never was interested in learning how to do it all. But they say now that what we were fixing isn’t good for you with all the grease we used. When we got married I knew more about cooking than Thelma did. I was the main one who helped her get started cooking but boy did she make a good one!

We’d come home from church on a Sunday, either walking or in the old model T Ford. If Mama didn’t have anything ready for dinner, she’d tell me, "Catch me a couple of chickens."

I’d run out in the yard and catch a chicken. It would start squawking and flapping to get loose, and I’d carry it by the legs to the chop block. I’d lower that chicken down to where the neck was just touching the wood. Then I’d pick up an ax and chop its head off. It would start thrashing around, throwing blood everywhere. I would try to keep it off the ground so its neck wouldn’t get dirty - or I’d have to chop the neck off some more. Sometimes after I chopped off their heads I couldn’t hold on to them, and they would break loose and flop around on the ground. When one chicken stopped thrashing, I would catch another one and do the same thing. Then I would carry them in to the kitchen where Mama had a kettle of boiling water to scald them. I held each one of them by the legs in the boiling water and then went back out in the yard and plucked the feathers off and brought them back for her to cook for dinner.

Mama fried chickens in hog lard. She’d cook hot biscuits to go with the chicken, and she’d fix gravy. They don’t make chicken that tastes that good now. That was fresh chicken. We didn’t have a refrigerator, and we had to cook and eat whatever we killed that day.

Daddy’s brothers made it a habit of coming down to our house and practice singing. Daddy was a singer, and so were Uncle Jesse, Uncle Wash, and Uncle John. They would show up and practice new convention songs. Baxter Music Company and Vaughn Music Company would put out new songs. They would put out songs where the lead would sing a word, and then the alto would sing a word. One would sing bass, one would sing lead, and Aunt Dora would sing alto.

The songs in the new songbooks would all come out with shape notes. First, Daddy and my uncles would sing just the shape notes. Then they would sing the words while they were looking at the shape notes.

They had an old pedal organ that Aunt Dora played along with them when they were singing.

Daddy had a tuning fork that he would bump and put close to his ear so he could tell what key to be in. Daddy used that tuning fork when he wanted to sing a solo. The folks around him wouldn’t hear the sound from it, but he could (so he could) get the right key.

I’d sit around and listen. I’ve always enjoyed singing.

Daddy was good on bass. He would sing bass at church, but lot of the time there wasn’t anyone to lead the choir, so Daddy would lead it. Daddy would be up there leading the choir, with Don standing beside him holding on to his britches leg. Don would have been 4 or 5 years old then.

At church I went to some singing schools. I never learned nothing. Every year or so they had someone come down to the church to teach singing. Mr. Ruppe and Mr. Towry, Alfred Towry's dad, would come down there to teach us. I would go there to the singing school. It was just like sitting in a schoolroom. They would teach us what the notes were in the songbook. We would then sing some. They would come down there to try to help you, and but I didn’t learn much. I loved to try to sing at church, and I sang bass when I was a teenager in the choir.

After we moved over here to the big house, we would go back and cultivate the White place. We grew corn over there and cane for molasses.

Once when I was 14 years old, I went over to the White place to get a wagonload of corn in the fall of the year. I had the mules to pull the wagon and 2 rabbit hounds that went everywhere I went. Some times the hounds would jump a rabbit and I would go with them and then come back and finish gathering the corn. That day the dogs led me up some hills and down some hollers. It was cloudy and I got lost. When I followed the holler to the creek, the creek was running backwards - or at least it seemed to be running in the opposite direction from what I thought it should be. Finally I saw a house on the top of the hill. When I got close I realized that I had visited there before. A colored family by the name of Hamilton lived there. It was close to Mountain Creek Church. As soon as I knew where I was I could find my way back to the White place.

Daddy taught me how to make molasses real clear. We would make molasses all day, all way though the night, and the next day, all day. We’d run the mill about 36 hours. It would take you about 2-3 hours just to get the molasses started, to get your juice coming. Then we would clean up. The most we ever made was 1,100 gallons in one year. Now, all of that wasn’t for ourselves. Other people brought cane too.

Daddy first started out making molasses in an old mill with a beam that you hooked a mule to, and the mule went round and round. The mill was mounted on 4 posts with a beam that went over the posts. The person feeding the mill where we made the juice for the molasses would usually sit in a chair because there was not enough room to stand. One day I was feeding the mill and I raised up without thinking. The beam hit me on the side of the head and pushed my head against one of the posts. It took my hat off. If I had been 1/4 inch higher it would probably have smashed my head.

Later Daddy converted the mill to power, where he got a Ford engine that he would run. He put gears and levers on it to power it down so it would go the right speed. My daddy wasn’t no dummy.

He put a 50-gallon wooden drum of molasses in the smokehouse for us to draw from during the winter. He had the drum laying on 2x4s. The plug was in the center of the side of the drum, and there was a leather lip to keep the molasses from dripping back on the drum. All you had to do was roll the drum a little to pour out a gallon, then roll it back and stick the plug back in.

We would sell the molasses at 50 cents a gallon. Dad would take it around to sell. Or if you would come around with your jug, he would sell it to you for 40 cents. And folks would come and work all day for two gallons of them molasses.

We would have a cane stripping. We grew 2 or 3 acres of cane, and we’d invite young folks over to strip it. Stripping meant getting rid of the fodder. Fodder is the long leaves on the cane stalk. We pulled the leaves off the stalk.

Young folks would come to strip cane date-like. They would bring their sweethearts with them. We cut the cane right above the ground with a mowing blade with a long handle on it. We’d cut a dozen stalks at one time, with one person holding the cane so when the other person cut the cane and lay it down in a bundle.

We’d get a bunch of the cane stripped for nothing, with a party like out there in the cane patch. Then we would get started making molasses with it.

Some people would cut a short cane stalk. Then they would twist it and bite it so they could suck the juice out of it.

We took the cane mill on a wagon back and forth - wherever we needed it.

We had corn-shucking dinners regular in the fall. We would help each other shuck their corn. My dad would pile his corn on the ground in a long heap. He would invite the neighbors to come over and shuck corn. Then he would serve them a big corn-shucking supper. It was like Thanksgiving - we had lots of good food. After we got the corn shucked, we would store it in the crib. The crib had slats lined with rat wire.

We used to have a lot of pigeons around the house. They would be flying around the barn. Out at town, when I went out there on trade day, pigeons would be all around. People would be feeding their horses and there would be a lot of grain lying around, and the pigeons would be pecking it up. Now you don't see that. Pigeons don't come around here now.

I don’t remember having a Christmas tree when we lived over at the White place.

We had Christmas trees up when we moved over to the big house. We would string popcorn and decorate the tree with it. In Dad's last years, he decided for us to string Christmas lights up in a tree that was down toward Maple Creek Road. We would have that tree lit up for about three weeks around Christmas time. People could see that tree as they drove to town or came down the hill going to the church. I bet there are still lights on that tree.

Christmas was never too exciting. We did not expect much and we didn't get much. Dad didn't have much money and we knew it. There just was not that much going on. I looked forward to getting a quarter when Dad would take us to town. Daddy would give us a quarter to spend at Christmas time, and I would get a box of 22 cartridges - that is what I would spend my money for. Show windows would be decorated inside, but there wasn’t any decorations out in the streets. Daddy would go to town and come back with a nickle bag of peppermint stick candy for us kids.

I’d get something for Christmas and they would say it was from Santa Claus. Once during the hard times, Daddy bought Mama an old homemade rocker, made with the bark still on it. It was probably willow wood. Dad hid that rocker out in the yard behind the hedge. It was a big surprise gift at Christmas time.

It was a tradition that Dad had to fire a shotgun several times early on Christmas morning - about the time we were opening our little gifts. One year he had obtained some firecrackers. He wasn't holding the 6-inch firecracker with his fingers but still had it in his hand when it went off. It crippled his hand for weeks. Daddy would always want to get out with a shotgun and try to jump a rabbit.

They used to make a little stopper gun - with a string attached to the cork. I guess I had one of them. Later I had an air rifle but I am not sure I got it for Christmas.

Ellen was the first one of us kids to have a car at home. She was working a 12-hour shift at the mill, and she bought a little Austin in the middle 1930s. She would lend it to me. Later I had some kind of an old car, and other people would ride with me.

Beattie was small and pretty when she was growing up. After the rest of us grew up and married, Beattie stayed at home and looked after Mama and Daddy. Even when she moved away because of her jobs with teaching, she would come home every weekend she could. She had a Pontiac, and she’d wash it every weekend she came back.

After Beattie married Arthur Gross in 1962, Beattie and I got a lot closer. Thelma and I would go down there and see her regularly. Thelma thought a lot of Beattie. Beattie would stay with us for periods of time.

I started to school in a little one-room schoolhouse about a quarter of mile from where we lived at the White place. They gave me an eye exam when I started to first grade and they discovered that I couldn’t see well out of my left eye. They put glasses on me and I’ve been wearing glasses ever since.

One of the problems we had was that lice got in at school. They would examine our hair and find the lice. At home Mama would get a fine tooth comb and would comb our hair. She would keep combing one day after another until she got all the eggs out too. If anyone had long hair she would shorten it.

In the second year, I took a bus to go to school. I got Typhoid fever and nearly missed all year. When we moved over here to the big house, I went to a 2-room schoolhouse just past the church and the Hyder home. This was called the Piedmont School and it was located on the Furman Hodge property.

Then later we had to walk to Rutherfordton Elementary School - at the same location that it is now. There was a girl there that was an orphan. She was really struck on me, and she would write me notes. I would answer them sometimes, enough to egg her on. We were in the fourth grade.

Another girl, Margaret Carpenter, was in the fourth grade with us. I admired her. She had one of the prettiest handwritings. Her Dad had a music store and sold guitars and such. They lived in town.

Many years later, Mother took knitting lessons from her but I never got to see her then. I would take Mother to her lessons but did not see the instructor. Then later, when I was about 75 years old and married to Sue, we went on a Christian Tours trip and I ran into the woman that had been this girl back in the fourth grade. I told her I liked her and thought she was real pretty but I was too backward to let her know. She was a city girl and I was a country boy. She was nice to me, but she didn’t do anything to let me know she had a crush on me. She told me on the trip that she had had a crush on me back then. I had had no idea. I was very bashful then.

We had a boy living with us that Dad had hired to do the farm work that he couldn’t do with his being gone all the time - a grown boy that needed a place to stay. Dad gave him room and board and he would pay him 4 dollars a month.

I just hated school. When it would come to studying and reading - I couldn’t make no sense of it. When I was in the 7th grade I come home from school and told Dad to send that boy home. I said, "I’ll do his work."

It wasn’t play that Daddy had that boy to do. It was to plow the fields. And I took on that and the rest of the jobs he needed done.

Dad would tell me at night or in the morning what he wanted done. Other times Dad would send me to the woods to get a load of firewood and I would get it done. I know that I didn’t always get done what I had to do. Sometimes I took off for a couple hours and chased after rabbits with a dog. Then I’d come back and work at what I had to get done.

I never remember Dad getting on me. I never remember him saying to me "You ought to have got done more." He was always happy with what I got done.

I was the only one of my brothers and sisters to quit school before starting high school. Beattie was the first one to go off to college. Then Reid, Charles, and Sue went to college.

Being a traveling salesman was good for Daddy, but more and more it was harder to sell stuff when people could get to town. After people got cars they come out of the woods so to speak. I don’t think a Rawleigh salesman could sell enough then to make a living.

He was making good money selling Rawleigh products along toward the last. But he could see what was coming.

So Dad decided to build a hardware store in Rutherfordton. He looked around and found an empty lot downtown. What I don’t know is why he wanted to build it right next to another hardware store. Maybe it was the last lot available. It was one of the last stores built in the little town of Rutherfordton.

After he picked out the lot, he then bought interest in the bank’s wall. He also needed to buy interest in the wall on the other side of the Hardware so he wouldn’t have to build a separate wall and lose space. Dad went to the owner and asked Mr. Keeter if he could buy interest in the wall of his building. Mr. Keeter said that competition was the life of business. They was friends. After he opened the hardware store, sometimes Dad would go over there and get something that he was out of and Keeter would come over to him and get something he needed. Many years later, my brother in law, Robert Hensley, bought Keeter's Hardware and made it into one large store.

When Dad first went to stocking that hardware store, he went up North and bought stuff for it. He was buying appliances and different things like that. The wholesale man went to his telephone, and Dad didn’t know it at the time, but the man called Dad’s bank to ask if he had enough money to cover his check. Later on the banker saw Dad and told him that he told the man that any check that Dad wrote would be good.

Daddy was good at selling other things besides Rawleigh products - whatever it took to put food on the table. After he started the hardware store, I’ve seen Daddy take off with three clothes washers and he didn’t come back until he sold them. He would find out where electricity was coming in and go out there and sell those people what they were going to need.

At one time Daddy had a peach orchard with about 50 trees up where Yates is living now. We didn’t get many peaches from them, because he never tended to them. It takes a lot of work to take care of peach trees.

He was trying something all the time to make a living. Whatever he wanted to do, I didn’t question him. I just worked and tried to help him.

One time along around then Daddy got out the plow and was breaking ground on Christmas day. He usually sowed wheat in the fall of the year. But he was working so hard that he hadn’t had time to plow before then. He was trying to grow some wheat to have bread for his family.

After a few years in the hardware store Daddy saw that he had a chance to take over the Ferguson tractor and implements dealership. Then he saw that selling tractors was too much for his building, and he went down on the branch and built a building there for his tractors. He did that till he retired. He finally sold out the hardware to my sister, Ellen and her husband Robert, and he didn’t fool with hardware anymore. And Ellen’s family is still at it today. I spent a lot of days with Ellen in her last days. I knew her time was short, and I wanted to spend what time with her I could.

When Daddy would give all of us kids each a piece of candy, Ellen would make that piece of candy last all day and maybe even the next. She knew how to conserve things. That’s how she did here business, how she ran that hardware store.

Piedmont Baptist Church started off with just one room, what is now the sanctuary. My grandpa, Martin Hill, prepared the brick they used to build the church.

When we had Sunday School, some would meet at one end and some would meet at the other and some would meet somewhere else. They would have classes in different corners of the church. People would talk low and didn’t seem to bother each other.

They had hitching posts where we could tie our mules when we came to church from the White place.

A big pot bellied stove sat right in the middle of church. Homemade pews were all around it. There are still some of them around. I think Helen has one of them.

They used candles and kerosene lanterns for lighting. Later they built a one-room shed behind the church where they kept tools for the cemetery. We had a gas generator in the shed that would light up the lights.

They had a well between the front of the church and the road. After we got electricity, I helped put a pump in the well so we could get more water. But the water was dingy and never clear. Some folks claimed it wasn’t safe, that water veins to the well came from the cemetery. So after we built the parsonage, we ran a pipe from there straight to the church.

People were a lot more emotional back then when they went to church. They would shout and go up and down the aisles and fall on the floor. They would go talk to their friends and anybody they thought was lost or anybody they thought needed to rededicate their lives to Christ.

There was a lot more praying at the altar. Some preachers would get everybody to go up. They would preach for everybody to come up to rededicate their lives and pray for a better church. Sermons would go about an hour. Some of the preachers would get long winded and didn’t know when to quit.

In the early years a preacher came just once a month. The other weeks you would have Sunday School and people would sing but we wouldn’t have a sermon. To pay the preacher when he did come, we had to appoint someone to collect money. I was appointed one time to collect the money for the preacher. I walked around and asked folks, and some people would gave me 50 cents and some a dollar, and some a dime. Whatever I collected is what the preacher got.

The total was a mighty little. But if the preacher got four or five dollars that was a lot back then.

I don’t think the church had a bank account in the ‘20s. Before too long we had enough money to have a preacher twice a month, and then we hired a preacher full time.

Women at church would walk around and talk with you about getting saved. I had wanted to go - knowing I ought to, I had wanted to be saved.

Women would also go out near the woods before service and pray before church for a good revival. The men would too but they weren’t as faithful as the women.

We had revivals in August that went on at least a week. We had services morning and night. Then if it was going good and a lot of folks being saved, it would go on longer.

There was a revival going on when I was 10 years old. This time I felt more compelled to go forward and I went down to the altar. I accepted Christ as my personal savior and I got satisfied that I would be better. Most everybody was excited and proud of me.

I was real faithful to church even after I had so many children. Then I was mighty faithful to get all of them there. When you have got five children, the seven of us down there pretty much would fill up a row. That was one of the things Thelma and I wanted to do - to be faithful to go to church. Before this I always sang in the choir but I stopped singing in the choir to help Thelma look after all our children during the church service.

We didn’t have a baptistry in the church until after electricity came in around 1937. In the hollow across from the church toward Florence Duncan’s house there was a spring. They built a concrete pool to catch the water from the spring, and that was where I was baptized. Several of us were baptized together. The water was too cold but I was tough enough that I didn’t mind it. The water that spring was so cold that they stopped using that pool for baptisms, and we would go down to the Broad River.

I drank my first Coca Cola when I was a teenager. It cost 5 cents. I was walking toward town along the creek behind the Ellenburg houses and through the woods. In New Hope there was a place called "Jinksville". It was just a little stand and someone was selling Coca Colas. I don't remember them selling anything else there. There was so much kick to that Coke that it liked to have burned me up.

I first tasted chewing tobacco when I was a teenager but I never did like it. Dad used chewing tobacco but he never did offer it to us. I took a puff of somebody’s cigarette but I never did like it. I was in elementary school at the time. When I was a teenager I tasted liquor out of a clear flat bottle. I didn’t drink any of it, but I tasted it to see what it was like. I didn’t like it. I’m glad I never liked any of that stuff. I never chewed any tobacco or dipped any snuff, but I have taken a few puffs off of somebody’s cigarette.

In the summertime, all us kids went around barefooted. The only time we wore shoes was when we went to church. I came back from church one Sunday and changed clothes and took off my shoes so I could go out and play. My cousin Earl and I decided to walk up to the fish camp about a mile away through the woods. When we got there we saw 2 boys sitting up on a billboard and we started throwing rocks just to aggravate them. We didn’t have nothing no better to do, I reckon. They couldn’t dodge the rocks much. They had to climb down from that billboard to start throwing rocks back at us.

I ran down a bank to get away from them and stepped right on a broken Coke bottle. It cut through my left foot deep enough that my whole heel was just flapping loose. The scar is still there today. I saw how bad the cut was and said "It’s time to head toward home." I hobbled back, bleeding and walking on my right foot and just the toes of my left foot. The first house I came across was right here where I live now. I sat down on the porch steps and rested a few minutes. My foot wasn’t bleeding much by then.

I got up to the house and my daddy immediately took me to the hospital. They had to do a lot of scraping and scrubbing to get all the dirt out before they could stitch it up. It was the worst pain I had ever experienced. Later on I found out that some man walking by the fish camp had seen the blood on the ground and had followed my tracks all the way over here wondering what had happened. We weren’t so poor that we couldn’t afford shoes but I was more comfortable going barefooted. I wore shoes after that more often than I had before. A few things like that will put some sense into you.

Daddy put us up an iron bar out in the front yard where we kids could catch on and exercise on. He’d get on and do anything we could, and a lot of things we couldn’t. He would hang with the bar behind his back by holding himself up in the crook of his arms. The way he did this, he would sit on the bar and slide off and catch himself with his arms behind his back. Then he would start swinging till he could flip right over that bar. He called that "grinding your muscle" and, my lands, that would tear up the muscles in your arms. I tried it and it was too much pain for me.

Once in a while there would be a carnival on the fourth of July. They’d have a fair at the fairgrounds in Spindale every summer, with rides and displays and booths. If anybody had a good heifer or a fat hog that they wanted to show, the FFA - the Future Farmers of America - they could take it there and put if on exhibit.

While I was a teenager, I went up in a little plane over in Forest City. Somebody brought the plane in to a big field and it was advertised that anyone could fly for a dollar. We just circled around over town and then come back down. There were 2 of us that sat behind the pilot. It was in the open air and the plane had double wings. I just flew for the heck of it, because the people did.

Dad got a big circular saw and he made a homemade rig for cutting logs. The saw was about three feet in diameter. If you pushed logs into a big saw like that and it had the right teeth, the saw would just zip the wood off. But if the wood got twisted or if it buckled. the saw could bind, which could break the saw blade or break a chunk of metal out of it.

Daddy owned a couple of houses that he rented out to people who worked on the farm. He would get people living in them who would help him on the farm. They could have been sharecroppers but there’s mighty little that I knew about what the arrangements were.

One house was up toward Yates and Ann, and he rented it to a colored man by the name of Staley and his family. The other house was down on the bottom where the Epley family lived.

Daddy brought in a big haul of wood on a wagon, 10 and 12 foot lengths. It was about waist high. He brought the saw up to the woodpile and started cutting the logs into firewood.

He was busy cutting when Mr. Staley came walking by on his way to town. He saw that we were cutting wood and could use some help. So he volunteered to help out. He started pushing the logs into the saw, cutting pieces. Somehow he and whoever was helping push the logs through let the saw get into a bind, and the blade suddenly broke into pieces and flew all over. One big piece of the saw that broke lose just rolled up his body, spilling his guts and cutting into his chest and through the side of his face. He bled to death right there in the yard. Dad called the ambulance and it wasn’t very long before the ambulance was there for him. Everybody was upset. I had never seen any one killed before. I have never seen anyone die like that since.

When I was seventeen, Woodrow Flynn, my cousin Earl Hill, and I went to the beach. We wanted a vacation. We wanted to see the ocean. We saved up a little money so we could take off. It was going to be the first time I would ever see the ocean.

We drove Mr. Flynn’s old model T that had a little bed on the back of it. It had a cloth top on it, but no way to close up the sides. It was open, it wasn’t bought that way, it was a homemade truck. If it come up a storm, you’d be soaked. It was a trap of a vehicle, but it went there and back with no problem.

It took us over 12 hours to get down to the beach. We drove that thing wide open. It would only go up to 30 miles an hour. You could drive an hour on the highway then and not meet a car.

That model T had three pedals for your feet. One was for the brakes. Another one was up higher and the last one was down lower. One of those was for going forward while the other was for going in reverse. It didn’t have no foot feed for the accelerator pedal. You had to use your hand to pull on a lever on the right side that come out under the steering wheel and was connected to it. It was just like a lever that you reach up to for changing gears. There was a lever on the left side of the steering wheel that controlled your spark. You just pulled that lever till the car was running better and then you left it alone.

We drove all night, and got there about 10:00 o’clock the next morning. That ocean was a lot of water. There were not many people on the beach. Folks didn’t go to the beach like they do now.

I never was a good swimmer. I could dog paddle and stay afloat. We had some inner tubes, and we floated out in the ocean on those inner tubes. We floated out so far that it was hard to get back. We got out far enough that we didn’t go out that far anymore. We didn’t eat a meal at a restaurant - we went to a grocery store and bought bananas and peanut butter and bread. We bought a whole bunch of Baby Ruth candy and ate that. It was nickle bars back then where it would be about a dollar now.

We done things that you wouldn’t be allowed to now. We camped about anywhere you wanted to. We camped on the beach, up higher than where the tide would come in to near Wilmington, North Carolina. We was gone about a week. It wasn’t too long after that that Uncle Jesse got up a trip and we went back.

I can never remember my Mother or Daddy whipping me. My daddy slapped me one time. Martin was riding a horse and I was walking, and I don’t think my dad saw what happened when Martin ran the horse up on me. I had a pick sack, so I slung it and hit him and Daddy slapped me. He didn’t see what Martin had done.

I would set out rabbit boxes. I had three of them. I would catch a rabbit, kill it and dress, and get on my horse and take it to town. Some folks out town would buy it for a quarter. Dad would take off and go rabbit hunting with me but his mind was on work.

I raised turkeys for a project to see if I could make a nickel. I built me a lot up here in the woods where Helen’s well is. I put my turkeys in it. I got the eggs and set them under a hen. It took about 4 weeks before they hatched. I was doing this before I got married. We just raised them on home made feed. Every time it come up a big rain, some would die. They would drown. They say little turkeys will just huddle up in a bunch with their heads up and drown. They don't even know to get in the dry. I lost more than survived.

Our corncribs didn’t have rat wire, and the rats would really have a ball. When rats got into the corncrib, Daddy and I would have rat killings. The corn would get down a ways, and under the cobs would be rats. We’d stir them up, and they’d start running. We’d grab a stick to wham them with. Or we’d put a cat in there with them, and they’d go after the rats. Cats would get rats, but they were especially good with the mice.

We wanted to keep the rats out of the corncrib because we would take that corn to the mill to sell, and we didn’t want to take it to sell if rats had peed on it.

We would load up the corn on the cob, and take it out to the mill. The mill would dump it in a sheller and grind it in to cornmeal. They would take a portion out, like a toll.

We never took off on Saturdays. Lots of people would take off on Saturday and go to town. But we never did - we had too much work to do, and we didn’t have any money any way.

We were raised not to work on Sunday. You do things now that you wouldn’t have then. We went to church and then would have a big dinner. Then we had to find something to do besides work, loaf, go swimming, play ball.

When I was a teenager, we’d go down to the creek, find a hole about knee deep, and wallow in it. We didn’t know what a bathing suit was back then. If we found a hole deep enough to take a bath in it, we pulled off our clothes and went in it with other kids. It felt like ice water. We wouldn’t be nude in a mixed crowd, but 2 or 3 boys and I would go off and swim together.

There was a place out on highway 108 toward the Broad River where the water ran over some rocks so it made a hole that was deeper than our head. They called it Bluff Rock. Some boys and I would go nude and jump in there and go swimming. We’d do that ever once in a while from the time I was a teen-ager till I was grown. We’d get in an old car and go over there.

Back then kids didn’t go out on the street and congregate and get into meanness. We got with our buddies and went off and swam or went off and played a ball game.

We used to do different from what everybody does now. Uncle Jesse lived right up the road across from where Lona’s house is now. Sometimes he and his family would come down to our house to talk or play checkers, and then they’d stay the night. Sometimes we’d go over there in the evening, and we’d spend the night.

Uncle Jesse had a boy named Earl who was a little younger than me, and I’d go over there and spend the night with him. Earl and Woodrow Flynn were my closest buddies growing up. I had another buddy, Curtis Hodge, and we would run together, go swim together. Later on Woodrow Flynn went on to be a preacher. When he was going to school he roomed with Billy Graham some. Now all the buddies I grew up with have died.

It was a rainy season when the stables were sloppy and messy. I had to go milk, so I turned the cow outside with her feed while I milked. She kept hitting me with her tail. Her tail was so short you couldn’t hold the end of it under your knee. So I just parted the hair and tied it in a square knot around my leg so she couldn’t keep slinging manure at me. When you got through milking her, you would take her to the field to pasture. Well, she finished eating before I finished milking, and she started off with me tied to her tail. She drug me along, with my hip bumping the ground. My hip got so torn up that I got boils on it and I had to wear a dress for about a month. I still had scars from that for years. I don't recommend doing this. It was a rough ride.

We had a homemade electric fence around the pasture to keep the cows from getting out. The fence was made out of a Model T coil, and it would give you a shock like you get when you would touch a live spark plug. We had one heifer that kept getting out. My brother, Martin got that heifer back in, and hollered for my brother Charles to turn the power off. When the power was off, Martin wrapped a piece of bailing wire around that cow’s ear, and then told Charles to turn the electric power back on. When Charles hit the switch, that cow dropped flat on the ground with all four legs out in front of it. Martin started shouting, "Cut it off! Cut it off! Cut it off!" and Charles cut it off. That cow shook itself and got up, and Martin let her go. We didn’t do that again.

We had a lot of chickens, so we took a board wrapped in chicken wire that we laid down on the ground. Then we attached the board to that electric fencer. When the chickens would get up some breadcrumbs we put on the board, we’d turn it on, and those chickens would go airborne.

Charles had a little old dog that came around the house and decided to get on that board. When he got shocked he wet all over it, and he went yelping out of there. That dog never got near that board after that.

You could look down across the field from our house and see through the woods. One day I heard a big racket coming from the woods, and I could see a chicken down there running for its life with a dog chasing after it.

I grabbed a gun off the wall, and ran down close enough to where I could see what was going on. When I come up on the dog, it was standing there holding the chicken. I shot and killed the dog and I went back later and buried it.

Later I found out it the dog belonged to a neighbor that had been accused of stealing chickens. With that dog just standing there, I was pretty sure at the time that the boy who owned the dog was hiding in the woods. He had trained the dog to catch chickens and hold them for him, but the boy couldn’t come out and get it. He never said anything about my killing his dog. And nothing was ever proved about who was stealing chickens. But the chicken stealing stopped right then.

When I wanted to go possum hunting, I would walk past the Flynn Road and the Sims Road on over to the next road to where Jack Twitty lived. He was a well thought of colored man. He always kept good possum dogs. We would go hunting for 3 or 4 hours and we’d usually come home with two or three possums. He was always interested in going out possum hunting, and he was superior at it. We had a lot of good times together. He had only one rule for me or anyone else that wanted to go hunting with him and his dogs. You had to agree to help him gather up his dogs when we finished chasing possums. What would happen is that the dogs would go off in different directions and sometimes be two or three hills beyond us. So it sometimes took a while to call them and find them and bring them back.

When I was about 18 years old, I was unusually strong in my arms and hands because of all the hard work I did. We had a game called "Pulling the Bull’s Tail." Four men would play it with a pole. The pole was about as round as a hoe handle and 10-12 feet long. Two men would get down on their hands and knees facing away from each other, and they would be the "pullers." The other two men would face each other and would straddle his partner on the ground. The man on top would reach his arms around his partner’s stomach and grab hold of the pole that was reaching out between the puller’s legs. Once the man on top got balanced he would lift his legs and put all his weight on the puller’s back to give him more traction. The pullers would scratch and dig with their feet to get even more traction. Someone would yell out, "Ready, go!" and each team holding its end of the pole would struggle as hard as possible to pull the other team backwards across the yard. Oscar Bridges and I could beat most any other team around here at that time.

I was a pallbearer for my grandma Mary Keeter’s funeral. I was almost 19 years old, and six foot tall. We had to go from the church out through the parking lot and up into the cemetery. The other pallbearers were shorter than me, and I was in the middle. I was the main one carrying the casket, with the ones on the end holding on. That was the heaviest casket I ever carried.

I went to work building the camps for the Civilian Conservation Corps. It was government doings to put a few people to work. I would get a ride to the camps with several boys from around here. There was about 6 us riding down there in a Nash car. Once the others passed a bottle of whiskey around. They knowed me well enough not to offer me any.

We had to put the buildings together. Our job was to bolt up the pieces that they shipped in. Later, Ivy Cowan bought that property and built his mansion there. I don't know what happened to those barracks.

Then I stayed with my Uncle Robert to help him do some building. I was a carpenter’s helper, doing whatever he hollered that needed done. We had to mix concrete from scratch. I made up the mortar out of lime, just big lumps of lime that you mixed with cement and water. I had to beat it up and get it pulverized. Then I would haul it to the mason and go back and mix some more.

If somebody offered you a job doing something that paid you a dollar, you’d take it. Martin was at home doing work for Daddy, and he and I weren’t getting along that well, and for some reason, I decided that I wanted to get out, so I stayed with Ray Hill and helped him raise a crop. Ray Hill lived in the Florence Duncan place - at that time Old Man Logan’s place. It’s on the hill across from the parsonage. It’s an old house. I helped him dig a well and we put a pump in it.

I did a lot of work for Ray Hill and I spent a lot of time with him. One day he stopped by after work and offered to give me a ride over to his house. He hadn’t had lunch yet and he had a sandwich and a quart jar of buttermilk with him. I volunteered to drive so he could eat his sandwich and drink his buttermilk. Ray ate his sandwich but when he tried to drink the buttermilk he kept spilling it. I stopped the car below his place and told him he could drink it now without spilling it. Just as he put the jar up to his mouth and started drinking, I got the idea to let my foot slip off the clutch. When I did, the car lurched forward and he splashed buttermilk all over his face and arms and shirt and pants. As soon as I saw it and started laughing, I opened the driver’s door and ran off down through the cornfield. But he didn’t get mad, and after I talked to him from the cornfield, I got back in the car and drove it up to the house. But he never forgot that as long as he lived.

One way he got back at me was a little while later when Ray brought his wife Maybelle home at midnight from the second shift. Ray decided they were going to stay up all night and nobody staying at his house that night was going to sleep. So he woke us up and pulled our covers off. We tried to go back to sleep and he did it again. And again. Finally, we gave up and got up and sat around with him and told jokes and such as that.

One Halloween someone put a two horse wagon up on the front porch, laying on its side. I don’t remember how they got it off.

People pulled lots of pranks back then. They didn’t have radios or TVs. They had to entertain themselves!

I knew I could do farm work for Ray or other people but I realized that I needed a regular paying job. That’s then I decided to apply to work at the weaving mill in Spindale. The first job I had I learned to weave. When I got to weaving I thought I might get a chance to fix looms. But that didn’t require a college education.

I had a mechanical mind. If I didn’t, I couldn’t have learned to fix looms.

I have never regretted that I didn’t get to go to college. I did good at what I did and I got through, and that’s the most anybody can ask for. I never did suggest one subject for my kids to take when they went off to school. I didn’t know nothing about it and I had to leave it up to them.

At the mill they found out I was mechanical enough that they upgraded me to fixing looms.

If something breaks, it just takes horse sense to fix it. Anything that gets made can be fixed, can’t it?

The wheels on our dishwasher tray came off because the axles broke off. I got a coat hanger that had the right size plastic to fit in there. I cut off short pieces of the coat hanger and glued them in to make an axle for each wheel. It works just fine.

Last year my lawn mower quit running. It’s one of those with a 44-inch blade and an 18 horsepower motor. It had a sealed transmission and it got to where it wouldn’t go. When I went to Sears to get it fixed, they told me that it couldn’t be fixed, but I talked to the owner of a lawn mower shop and he told me that if I could put some oil in the transmission it should run. It has a rubber hose that the transmission has to have in order to breathe.

So I took the lawn mower over to my nephew, Mark Hill, and had him look at it. He brought it back in a few days, and said that he had been able to force just a little oil into the transmission.

I could see what he meant. I pulled the breather cap out of the end of the hose, and put a funnel in it, and poured oil in. It just barely would go in, just a drop or two. That when I got the idea on how to suck oil into the engine.

I cranked it up with the oil and funnel in the breather hose. I rigged up the funnel so the oil would go down that hose, and when it started a moving it sucked a whole quart of oil in. It has run perfectly ever since.

I’ve liked girls for I reckon all my life. I met a girl named Panthy over at Uncle John’s while I was staying with Ray Hill that year, helping him make a crop. I was 20. She lived way out of the way on a farm on Broad River. I borrowed Ray’s car and went to see her one Saturday night. I had to drive in there on a dirt road for several miles. It come up one of the awfulest storms. Her dad said, "there’s no way that you are going to get out of here tonight. We’ll get a team of mules to get you out tomorrow." They give me a bed to sleep in. So I slept there and I was miserable, knowing I had Ray’s car and I had work to do. I didn’t date her again. There just wasn't any spark there.

There were other girls that I liked around that time but I never had many dates until Thelma come along. I was kind of like Jim. You’d be surprised at how few dates he had till he was 32. Now Fred was just the opposite of Jim and me. He was dating girls in high school and would even bring them home to meet us.

Frank Leslie Cole bought the house that my grandpa Martin Hill had built for his daddy, Barney Hill. The house had been out of the family for some years. When Mr. Cole moved into the house, his daughters Thelma and Betty came with him and his wife Nancy. When Thelma was just seven years old, her mama had died. Nancy was her stepmother, and her maiden name was Robertson. Betty was Frank and Nancy’s daughter. She was just a kid at the time when they moved into the house.

In the fall of 1934, a group of us young people were getting together at our house. Ellen and Beattie invited Thelma to join the party. Thelma was new to the area and they invited her. I paid her no attention at the party. When the party was breaking up, Ellen and Beattie suggested that I walk Thelma home because it was dark. Of course I said yes. Walking her home got me wanting to see her more. We chatted a little. I asked her for a date, and pretty soon I was dating her regularly.

When I was dating Thelma I was walking back home to where Ray Hill lived across from the church. One night it was so dark and cloudy - we hardly had any moon. I couldn’t barely even see the ruts in the road right in front of my feet. Cars had rode down the path enough that I could slowly walk along. I could hardly see my hands out in front of me. It was the darkest night I can ever remember. It was even too dark to walk!

Suddenly I heard some dogs barking and growling louder and louder and coming right at me. They kept coming closer and I thought they were out to get me. I could feel cold chills break out all over my body. I stepped off the path just as they rushed toward me. Those dogs brushed by me and ran on, just a snapping at each other. But they didn’t even see me. They didn’t know I was there, and I couldn’t see them. I wouldn’t doubt but that it was one dog in heat and one or two others going after her. After they kept running and barking I felt a lot better and kept trying to find my way home.

Thelma was kind. I thought she cared something for me. And before a year was over she let me know that she cared for me. In the living room where I live now, she let me know that if we got married she wanted to have children.

The first time Thelma and I kissed we were standing right here on this porch. Of course there was no windows then or anything like it looks like now. This old house was just boxed up on the outside, and later on I put up weather boarding on the sides. This is how we met and I was never interested in another girl after I met her.

Her father, Frank, and her stepmother, Nancy, were likable people. Frank was quiet but he wasn’t bashful. I never heard a bad word out of him. He wasn’t a churchgoer but he was a well thought of man.

He was small and he had had a hard life. His face was wrinkled like he was 20 years older. His face was more wrinkled than mine is now. He had a hard life. He was a mill worker. He overhauled spinning frames. He was a mechanic-machinist. He would replace bearings and things that wore out. It was dirty work pulling apart those machines.

They had never farmed, but they really tried to. They worked hard trying to make a go at it, but they couldn’t. They put in cotton up on top of the hill. Boy, the grass got in there, and they had to work like the devil to get it out. Rainy weather came and they couldn’t get in there and hoe. They seen that farming wasn’t down their line.

Thelma was working at the mill when I met her. She worked in the warping room, working with yarn. She had gone to work at the mill when she was a teenager. Just like me, she had quit school and gone to work to help her family out. Then 2 or 3 years later she went back and finished up high school. What I have heard is that when her sister Ola Mae went off and got married against her father’s wishes, he decided to pay for Thelma to go back to high school.

Thelma and I courted for about a year, and then decided we’d quit and get married. My mother was against my marrying Thelma. She said, "James, she’s not healthy." But she must have been pretty healthy. She worked and she bore five children. Mama had a right to say that. Whether she had a right to try to dishearten me, I don’t know.

My mother didn’t try to keep me from getting married to Thelma. But Mama wanted to warn me. That girl had been diagnosed with having tuberculosis. But I knew all that. She was stronger as she was eating better.

I got that every time I married. When I met Sue, she was sick too. I knew that she had a lot of health problems, but she went on to live for nearly 13 years. When I met Edith, I learned about her health problems. But it didn’t make no difference. I wanted to be with her.

My dad always came to my rescue. When I wanted to get married the first time, I went to the bank and signed a note for $50 to start housekeeping in a house in Spindale. We just had two rooms - a kitchen and a bedroom. Dad co-signed the note with me. If he had not co-signed it, the bank would not have given me the loan. I was to pay it back a dollar a week. As long as Daddy lived, I didn't want to do anything until I talked to him. That's where I got my advice.

Back then you didn’t have any luxuries. We bought just the things we had to have. If you had a chair, it was just a straight chair. We took that $50 and started house keeping on it. The only thing that cost much is the dresser we got, which was $20. Everything else was dirt cheap. We bought 4 chairs and paid $1.10 a piece for them. We kept two of them chairs at the table. If more than 4 people were there we sat on the bed. We bought a cast iron heater that burned coal for six dollars. We put a stovepipe oven on that heater and would bake on top of the stove. There was one joint of stovepipe on top of the heater, then an oval heater that was 2 ply so the heat went around and between the two layers and cooked what was in the oven. There was a door on the front and a rack inside.

With Thelma and me a lot of the time back then, it was, "Root, pig, or die" - meaning that if you did not work for what you needed, you would die. There was some rough spots I can remember. We worked our butts off.

Before we ever got married, we definitely knew we wanted to have children. If anything, she led in the discussion about it. We was looking forward to having children. The first thing that we wanted was some children.

Back when you’re first dating and courting, you’re green, you don’t know what to do. I wanted to ask Mr. Cole about marrying Thelma. But I could never run into him. So I watched till he drove home one night, and as he came down the road, I flagged him down. I told him that we wanted to get married and I wanted to know what he had to say about it. He said it was all right with him.

We didn’t get married in a church. We were more or less eloping but Daddy and Mama knew about it. We went up to the parsonage of the First Baptist Church in Rutherfordton to Preacher Jenkins. It was on a Saturday. We took my brother Martin and Thelma’s cousin, Adele Irwin, to be witnesses. Piedmont did not have a parsonage then with a live-in preacher. We knew about Preacher Jenkins and everyone liked him.

After the wedding, we came home and saw Mama and Daddy and Thelma’s family. Then we went home to our two-room apartment. We fixed up the apartment before we got married. For supper that night, we had pork and beans, canned tomatoes, and crackers. It was a good supper and I ain’t been hungry since. I’ve always had plenty, most of the time too much.

When we got married, I had been working at the mill for a year or so. Thelma was working there too when we was dating. When we got married, she was working in the warper room, fixing yarn for warps.

Uncle Reid came down to Daddy's house to visit. Thelma and I were there too. Uncle Reid wanted me to take him rabbit hunting over on the old White place. We took my rabbit dogs, and we went out there through the brush. Suddenly I heard him call to me. He was lying on the ground in pain and told me, "I broke my foot, I can’t walk." He had been trying to jump across a creek. He found a place where he could jump out on a sand bar in the middle of the creek, but when he landed he broke his ankle. Uncle Reid was a hotel manager back then, and his ankles were too tender for him to be jumping.

I had to walk about 3 miles until I found a man who would let me borrow his horse and buggy. Then I had to find my way back to Uncle Reid, and lift him up into the buggy. I hauled him back to the hotel where he was staying. He didn’t want me to take him to the hospital. Going to the hotel was all he wanted me to do. After a few days he was enough better that he went back to Asheville where he lived.

Our first house was in Spindale over on highway 74 and we rented from Mrs. Duncan. The reason we moved to Spindale was transportation. Thelma worked on a different shift, and we needed two cars and we didn’t have any.

In the spring of 1936 Spindale Mill let us rent a little 3-room house that they owned. We paid about $4.00 a month. They would take it out of your pay. We’d walked back and forth to the mill. There was a garden spot beside the house and we grew a good garden that year.

You could buy a good car then for a few hundred dollars. We didn’t have it so we would borrow a car. And on weekends, someone would get us and bring us up to Dad’s.

One morning when we were both working on the first shift, we were walking to work. We walked by what is now that Cloth Shop, and that eighth nerve hit Thelma, and she fell like she had been shot. I got help and got her back to the house. It was pretty exciting. We didn’t have no children yet. That scared the fire out of me. I never seen anything like that before. I saw her many a time have them attacks, when she would get out of bed and then get dizzy and fall back into the bed.

That summer we found out that Mr. Cole was going to sell this house. Daddy talked to him, and we bought it and moved back over to here. When we bought this house Mr. Cole gave us a young Jersey heifer along with it. She was a good milker.

That winter every day I would walk past where Yates lives up to the highway. It was close to a mile up there. A fellow by the name of Lee Crawford had first got me my first job at Spindale mill. Lee Crawford lived over on Flynn Road, and I knew what time he would be coming along the highway on his way to work. So I would meet him to get a ride to work.

His car only had one seat in it and that was where he and his wife would ride. I could have crowded in with them. But he told me that if I wanted to ride with them, I would have to ride in the trunk. He would stop to pick me up and open the trunk, and I would sit in the trunk with the trunk lid open and ride all the way to work. Crawford died sometime after that. He had got drunk and they found him dead way out in woods behind his house.

When Thelma worked at the mill on a different shift she would walk from the house here down to the road and get a ride with Furman Hodge. After we had a big snow Furman couldn’t get up here, and he let Thelma out down at the road. She had to walk up to the house through drifts that come up to her knees. Back then women didn’t wear pants much. She was wearing a dress and maybe some stockings. Anyhow, that snow and cold really hurt her legs. They hurt some from then on. Things like that happened and you just took them.

Thelma worked while she was pregnant with Joann. After Joann was born and Thelma recovered, she went back to work.

We had moved here by the time that Joann was born. I was working, and Thelma was going to be down getting ready to have a baby, and I couldn’t stay at the house and care for her. You had to make a dollar. So Mama was looking after her. The doctor came to the house at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday evening with his nurse. When Joann was first delivered the doctor picked her up by her feet and spanked her butt, and she started to cry. I was so thrilled I cried. They didn’t leave the house one time until she was delivered, which was 10:30 p.m. on Sunday evening. They charged me $20 for being there that 27 hours. I remember we were proud of how Thelma did, all the way through. Thelma had a hard time though.

We moved to back to Spindale and rented a couple of rooms from Aunt Dora when Jim was a baby and Joann was little. We had different ones to stay with them while we worked. One of the Adams girls, a teen-ager, stayed with them.

We took that cow we got from Thelma’s dad back to Spindale with us. We had a place where you could put her up at night. Once when Thelma was milking the cow she turned around in the stall and butted her bad. It wounded her some. That cow had long horns that curved back around to her head - otherwise it could have really hurt her.

Now when Jimmy was born Thelma really had a hard time. When the doctor come to help deliver Jim, Thelma had passed completely out and quit breathing because the nurse had given her too much gas to help block the hard pains. The doctor jumped on the bed and started mashing her chest, and she started breathing again. She had such a hard time that afterwards she took pneumonia. Her sister, Ola Mae, took the train down from Washington and stayed with her. She didn’t go to the hospital but we wondered for a few days there if she was going to make it.

Soon after that Thelma’s dad died all of a sudden. He got up and ate breakfast on a Sunday morning. Then he said, "I feel like I’m smothering." That was the last words he said. He had an artery broke. He was bleeding inside. He seemed like an old man when I knew him, but he was only 53 years of age when he died. And her brother, Charlie, died at 53 too.

Life was so safe back then that I can remember us going to the beach for a week and pulling the door behind us and never locking it.

Thelma stayed home and didn’t work at the mill any more after Helen was born. By the time you find a baby sitter and get them, and the amount they waste, we decided that Thelma could do better staying home than working and using a baby sitter.

When Louise and Walter lived over on the hill, their boy Raymond was about 5 years old and he wouldn’t eat. So they let him come over here and stay with our kids. He’d get to playing with our kids and when they would all get tired the kids would eat and Raymond would eat just like them. He probably stayed over here for a week or more, and after he went home he ate a lot better.

Looking after the kids, tending diapers and that stuff, I done it all too. I was always ready to help with the cooking, tend with the kids. I felt responsible. I didn’t do much cooking, but I was the one that taught her how to cook. She got to where she could cook anything. When we got married she had never cooked.

There was a lot of things I knew how to cook, but a lot of things I can’t, like baking. I don’t ever remember my Dad cooking anything.

You marry somebody like Thelma and live with her 50 years, and you change. You take a good woman who marries a bad man, it makes the bad man good. I’ve had three wives, and I don’t know whether I’m just naturally smart, or whether the Lord just takes care of me. I can see that those 3 marriages is what made me.

Thelma was always very agreeable. When she went into labor pains with Fred, we called our regular doctor, Dr. Eaves. Thelma was in a bed that is right here in what is now our living room. He was out on another labor case. It was 8 or 9 at night. So we called Dr. Bostic and he come immediately. All of a sudden, Thelma let me know that there was a baby in the bed with her. Fred had arrived before the doctor got there. I got excited, because I didn’t know what to do. I knew there was a cord to cut and such. So the Doctor got there then and done that work. He checked Thelma out and left, and less than an hour after Fred was born we went to bed. Fred is the only one of my children that the doctor didn’t deliver. At this time, an office call at the doctor's was $1.50. A house call was $3.00 and a delivery was $20. We paid Dr. Bostic $20 for less than an hour and paid the same $20 rate to Dr. Eaves for him and his nurse being there 27 hours.

Everyone of my kids went to helping out at an early age. Thelma and I taught them all to work.

By the time they were six years old they would feed the cows and let them go out to pasture. They worked all the time. They helped with baling hay. Joann was driving a tractor as soon as she was a teenager, and the boys did too.

Fred and Jim picked on each other all the time. Anything they could do to each other they would do it. They were always slapping at each other, wrestling, knocking around. They would pull chairs out from each other.

From the time he started off to school Fred would have sweethearts. Jim would ignore the girls.

One time Fred had my car and took it down by the clubhouse to drag race with some other boys. I let him know that I knew about it and I didn’t want him using it for that. I was afraid with them on that road down there, going side by side, they was going to meet somebody. He said I found out about everything and said "I can’t get away with nothing, and Jim can get away with murder."

When our kids was small, we didn’t have electricity, we just had kerosene lamps.

It got so cold when we didn’t have any heat except for our fireplaces, a wood stove for cooking and a wood stove for heating. I was working on the third shift and sleeping in the back room where we have our bedroom now, only it was smaller. I kept the door closed to make it as quiet as I could so I could sleep. I wasn’t going to get any heat from that little heater anyway. I would take water back there in case I might need a swallow at night. When I reached for it, it had formed so much ice that I couldn’t drink it. The room wasn’t insulated. We didn’t have any running water. We had to carry a bucket of water into the house for drinking.

The first time we got electricity was when we lived in this house in the late ‘30s. We got in-door plumbing in the late ‘40s. We used to go way out behind the house to a gully where we had an outhouse.

I insulated this house before we moved over to the new house on Maple Creek Road. We never had central heat back then. Oil was about 15 cents a gallon, and I used 400 gallons one winter to keep this house warm.

We had a wood stove up until the 1950s. The kitchen stove was bottled gas after that. We burned a lot of wood. One time even Thelma went with me to the woods to saw up some wood. She pulled one end of the saw but she couldn't get the swing of it.

There was a well here in the back yard when Thelma and I moved here. It wasn’t deep enough, so we had it dug deeper and we put a pump on it when we got electricity in the ‘40s. Many years later, when I was in my late 70s, I got stuck in that same well. The top of the well is barrel shaped. It is easy to climb down into the well but coming up there is not room to bend your legs to pull it up to the next step. I went down a ladder to work on the pump in the well. It was easy going down but I could not climb up far enough to get out of the well - just not enough room to swing my leg around to the higher rung on the ladder. Don was here and he called Yates to come help. So I just waited until Yates got here. They each got me by the arm and lifted me enough that I could pull myself out with my arms.

When the mill did not have orders it would shut down. Then I would work for different people. One time I was working part time for Oscar Bridges and making 10 cents an hour.

One day we got rained out and I walked home in a storm. By the time I got home I was soaked. Jim was a small boy, 2 or 3 years old, and was sitting in the living room window. Lightning struck close in the yard somewhere and Jim fell out of the window. The window was low and he didn't get hurt but some thought maybe he was shocked but I think he was just scared by the lightning.

Early in our marriage, Thelma led a discussion that we ought to start tithing. She got a ledger and kept a record for several years so we could know how much we should be giving. I’d give anything to find that book. I keep thinking it might show up. That’s one thing that I would suggest to anyone that believes, that is saved. I believe that tithing is one reason we have been blessed.

Thelma and I had a bunch of rabbits that we grew down by the branch. We had about 50 of them. I sold some of them but I finally had to get rid of them. It was a downhill business. Fooling with rabbits, anywhere you keep them, you’re going to get an odor, no matter what you do. They used to have domestic rabbits on the market. I thought we’d eat them but the kids called them pets and wouldn’t eat them. We started doing it, because my cousin Charles Higgins was raising them and had a market for it. He finally went out of doing it too.

I bought a bull that kept trying to get out. He gave us a fit when we brought him home while he was on the truck bed. He tried to go over the cab. When we got him penned up, he kept getting loose.

After a few weeks of him getting out and me going after him, Sybil called and said you got a cow down on the highway. I used the truck to steer him up the hill. But then he went around Charles’s house, and I went after him till he came on to Jimmy’s. He circled around Jimmy’s and I finally got him on down here to where I had an enclosure with electric wires. He just jumped out of it and came at me. I had to get in the truck before me got me. He wandered back up to Charles’s and started eating apples that had fallen off a tree.

I came back down and told Thelma what had happened. Then I called the meat packing company in Forest City and said, "I got a bull that’s out. If I kill him, will you come get him?" They said yes. I went back in the house and got my army carbine. I went up there, and he raised his head to come at me. I raised my rifle and shot him, and then I waited till they came and got him. That’s the only time I ever lost my cool. I had him dressed, and he came out to about 1,100 pounds. That was some of the best eating I ever had.

We also had cows and sold milk. I had as many as 35 cows, and I milked as many as 11 cows at one time. When I had my own cows, I used electrical milkers, and I had a couple that would kick. I dreaded having to deal with them. It would get on my nerves. Lots of animals fight with their legs. I had to use kickers that you tied on them, and they still would try to kick.

I had a big electric cooler. I put milk in ten-gallon cans. I would take the cans down to the road and the Carnation truck would come and pick it up. Carnation paid so little for the milk that I never made any money from them. I sold all the extra milk for 50 cents a gallon to anyone who would come by and pick it up. Carnation paid me less than 50 cents a gallon. I did that until 1962 when we moved to the house on Maple Creek Road. I was getting ready to retire and quit milking cows.

The cows were all colored kind of alike, and a young cow disappeared but I didn’t know it for several days. A few weeks later I was walking the fence and I saw the bones of that heifer. She had jumped the fence but her legs had got caught in the top two strands and she couldn’t get loose. The buzzards had picked her bones by the time I found her. I would fool with cattle, selling extra bulls, and all that I didn’t want to keep. And we ate a lot of beef too.

I’ve even tried to grow cotton as a cash crop for a year or two. Not much cash in it though. Too much work going into it. It was a backbreaking job picking it. I think maybe we sold a couple of bales. I was trying too many things at the time. I was working at the mill, and trying to do too many things on the side. It’s hard to understand why, but I was just trying to get another nickel somewhere.

My brother Martin had a hog parlor up the road toward Yates. He had two buildings for the hogs, one was for farrowing (shutting the sows up to raise the little pigs) and the other one was for feeding them and growing them out for the market. Martin quit the hog business, and the buildings were standing there empty.

I had a whole lot of shell corn over here in my barn that got moldy. It got bad on me. I had left it piled up too deep. Now they put it is silos and pump air through it. The county agent said all I could do with the moldy corn was to feed it to hogs. I had 11 pigs at the time. I took them up there and raised them in the hog parlor.

They were young pigs when I took them up there, and I grew them out over the next 4 or 5 months. I ground up that moldy corn and mixed it with supplement and fed them till they were about 200 pounds a piece. Then I killed them and took them down to a freezer locker. When I killed those hogs I sold them one piece at a time. I would sell one person a ham, and another person a half, until I got rid of it all. So I made out pretty good - but not good enough to stay in the hog business.

When they were drafting people for World War II, I was weaving Navy neckerchiefs. It’s a black tie that they tie around their neck. So I was deferred. Some of them that had as many kids as I had still had to go. They had a name for that. If you was on a job doing supplies for the Army you were deferred. I expected to have to go, but I didn’t want to go. I didn’t care nothing about going out and killing. I didn’t want in no war.

In December 1942, my navel started draining and I got really sick. The doctor told me that it was from an infection from something that happened when I was born. He told me it was too dangerous to operate until it stopped draining. But the infection wouldn’t dry out. Every day it got worse. It would soak through a 2-inch pad every day.

I didn’t work any after the infection started. I was too weak to work. My brother Charles would come down here and feed my hogs for me.

I didn’t have a car then and Dad had to take me out to the hospital to get a fresh dressing. He could see me going down hill. Dad was still selling Rawleigh products. How he planned his day, how he handled his work so he could be there to take me to the hospital, I don’t know. I didn’t know then how he did it.

The infection got worse and worse day after day, and I kept getting weaker. When I went to see the doctor in March, 3 doctors saw me at the same time. Then they went out of the room to talk. Finally one came back in and said, "We’ve got to operate now." I said to him, "You told me that you couldn’t operate until it dries up" and he said, "Now we have to. We don’t have any other choice!"

I was already so weak I could hardly walk. I was scared I wouldn’t pull through the operation, and I’d leave a wife with three little children.

They operated that day. After the operation, Thelma would come in to see about me, and then she would go back home. Someone had to stay with Joann, Jimmy, and Fred. They let me out of the hospital a week later, and after a few weeks I went back at work.

We didn’t have a nickel to spend during that time. I had mill insurance that took care of the operation. We had food from the garden, and meat and things we raised.

There was three days before I had the operation that I truly thought I wasn’t going to make it. It got so bad that I just about wanted to die. But the Lord wasn’t through with me, and I came through it. My cousin, Blanche Hill, came to see me after my operation, and I told her I couldn’t talk because I was so weak.

Just about 12 months later, I got an appendicitis attack at work. From the way it hurt, I told my overseer that I was sure it was appendicitis. I told him I was going to the doctor.

I left the mill and come straight home and took a bath. Weaving was a dirty, dusty job, and I didn’t want to go to the doctor like that. I just sat down and cried; the children didn’t realize what was going on. I told Thelma I thought that an operation for my appendix would be as bad as the other operation. My other operation was so rough, so to think that I was going to have to go through another one like that, and that quick, it made me cry. I was afraid I was going to die.

I knew that I was going to have to go to the hospital, and I knew they were going to keep me. I left my work and went to see Dr. Eaves, and he said, "You go straight to the hospital." They operated on me that same day, and told me the next morning that it was a good thing that I didn’t wait any longer, that it was ready to rupture.

But the appendicitis operation was a picnic compared to what I went through with for my other operation. Still they kept me in the hospital over a week, and several days after that I was on a liquid diet.

Later Thelma and I were talking about my two operations, and she said that it was good for us. She meant that it was good to go through tough places so you know how to handle things. It’ll make you appreciate better times.

Thelma took it when some women would get out and leave you. She didn’t mind going through the hard times.

For a lot of years out there at that hospital, they had a different building for the colored folk. You thought it was the way it was supposed to be.

Once in a while my dad would work with a colored man, or a colored woman would come in and do ironing. I never thought like we were better than them. I was glad to see the day when they went to give them their rights.

Aunt Lizzie fell and broke her leg, and Daddy took her out there to the hospital. When the time come for her to come home, Daddy didn’t have the money and we didn’t have any insurance. They said they would have to have the money before they could release her. So my dad told them that they could do a better job of keeping her than he could. He told them that "You all are doing a lot better job of taking care of her than I can. I’m just giving her a place to stay. I don’t have the money now, but I will pay the bill." They got her ready to come home right away.

His neighbors came in and helped cut wood, and my daddy hauled it out to sell. He took the wood to pay that hospital bill.

Thelma cut up print feed sacks that she used to make clothes for me and the kids. We still used heavy old-timey irons after Thelma and I got married. Then we got an electric iron as soon as electric lines come in. But as soon as permanent press clothes came out, Thelma wouldn’t use an iron any more. It had to be something special for her to iron it.

Along about the time that permanent press shirts were coming out, somebody gave me a nice 100% cotton dress shirt. Thelma made no bones about the fact that she wasn’t going to starch and iron shirts any more. Thelma gave that shirt away. She didn’t have time for that with five kids to raise.

I bought me a possum dog in the ‘40s. We’d go out after dark with it. That dog would come across a possum track and go after it, and chase that possum till it could put him up a tree. When I caught up I’d shake that possum out of the tree.

If I couldn’t shake the possum out just standing there on the ground, I’d climb the tree and shake it. When the possum would fall to the ground, WHOPP!!!, it would get up and run. The dog would chase after it, grab it, and start shaking it. He wouldn’t let that possum down until it appeared to be dead. I’d take the possum away from the dog and put it in a bag. And we’d go on.

We’d keep hunting possums all night long some times. And the next day I had to go to work!

When we had as many as we thought we could get, or when we were tired, we’d come home. When we spilled them out on the bag into the yard, they’d revive and we’d let them loose.

Now why did I do that? Why did I go in the first place to hunt something that I didn’t want?

Last year, one of my dogs carried a dead possum into the yard. I picked the possum up by the tail and laid it in the back of the go-cart to take it to bury. I was going along on the go-cart when suddenly that possum run right past me! So much for thinking that dead looking possums are dead.

The first tractor I ever owned was an old McCormick - Deering build by International that I bought around 1940. It run on kerosene. All it could do was pull things, no hydraulic no nothing.

Then I went in with my daddy and bought a tractor after he went to selling Ferguson tractor. It had hydraulic lift, lights, the works. The last tractor I bought was a new 1957 Ferguson, which I still got. It still runs good.

Dr. Moss had a hay baler that broke loose from his tractor, and it run down a bluff into some bushes and got stuck. It was at the foot of the bluff, and it was so steep that you couldn’t get it out. You would have had to have a tractor with a four-wheel drive, which they didn’t have back then. Dr. Moss thought the only way you could get it out would be if you hooked a heavy cable to it and pulled it from on top of the bluff. In the meanwhile, he got to a telephone and called me to come and bale his hay for him.

When I got out there and started baling hay, I saw where his hay baler was stuck down in that ditch. I thought my tractor could do it if I could keep the front end down. I told him that if he and the other fellow there helping him would stand on the front bumper of my Ferguson tractor I thought I could get it out.

I put the tractor in the lowest gear with those two guys hanging on the front. Slowly we pulled that hay baler out. Dr. Moss was so impressed he said "Well, I’ll be damned!" and the next day he went down and bought a Ferguson tractor from my daddy.

In the ‘50s, I went on third shift fixing looms. Then I went to farming heavier. I would come home from the mill at 8 o’clock, farm, and then get some sleep before I would go back to work. Sometimes I would work all day, but I would rather work and take a late lunch and get to bed by 2:00 pm.

I cut a tree and it fell down on me, and I cut my leg bad. The tree was about 8 inches in size. I had to cut another tree to get it down, and when I did it kicked back on me. Then the next year, I cut myself again cutting wood.

Besides tending to my own farm, I would take my tractor and go around baling hay for other people. They called it custom baling hay - baling hay for the public.

Over the years I baled a lot of hay! Back then you would run the tractor all day for $3.00 an hour, and you had to put the gas into it.

In the summer time when you’re baling hay, the first thing is to rake the hay into lines. There were a lot of snakes back then, and they would crawl up into where we raked the hay. When the baler came along, its teeth would pick those snakes up and toss them right into the bales. A few times I remember looking at a bale of hay and seeing the head of a snake sticking out.

One year, I baled 1,600 bales for Dr. Moss, with him giving me 3 bales for every four I did so long as I put it up in the barn. People would come by and make orders to buy hay bales from me while it was still lying out there on the ground.

I was baling hay another day, and the prong that scoops up the hay picked up a pebble that flew up and hit my glasses and busted it. The lens shattered glass all into my eye. They took me down to Spartanburg to the eye doctor to get out the pieces. He got out what he could. After I come back home I knew there was something still in there because I could feel it cutting. My sister Ellen was there and she was able to get three more little fine pieces out!

Another time Thelma fell with that eighth nerve when Joyce was with her going down to the road to the mailbox. Joyce was about 5 years old. She sent Joyce back up to the house to ask Joann to come down there. Joann said she was too busy doing the work her mother told her to do.

Thelma just couldn’t raise up and everything was spinning around for her.

I was always looking for a way to make another dollar. We tried to save everything we could. I didn’t feel like I was ever going to get enough ahead to slow down.

I would not sit around and visit with people because I had so many chores to do. That’s kind of like the way Daddy was. He’d be doing chores and then walk in and say, "It’s time to go to church. Do you want to go with m