Month: August 2017

The Scar

Pop, Dave, and I were standing on the porch of the cabin at Snowbird, in the mountains of North Carolina close to the Tennessee border, when two fellows in their early 20’s came out of the woods into a clearing below the cabin. They were carrying rifles, they had pistols and knives strapped to their belts, and they had dogs. They were hunting.

Pop, L, Pat and Dave Stith, at Snowbird.
Pop, L, Pat and Dave Stith, at Snowbird.

They stopped, we greeted each other, and then my brothers and I walk down there to talk. Or rather, Pop talked. Dave and I mostly kept our mouths shut and listened.  Pop had a way about him that mountain men liked. I think they knew he was one of them, just from a different neck of the woods.

“How often do you boys hunt?” Pop asked.
And one of them said, “Every day during boar and bear season,” which runs about three months.

Pop was surprised because he could see one of them was wearing a wedding band and he said, “You’re married.”

“Not but nine months a year,” the man replied.

Black bear
Black bear

They got to talking about bears that get tired of running and turn on dogs tracking them, killing one sometimes.   That’s when one of the hunters pulled his shirt half way up so we could see his side and said, “That’s what a bear done to me.”

The scar across the side of his belly was awful, a terrible, jagged looking thing.

And then the other hunter spoke up.

“He’s lying to you,” the other man said.  “That won’t no bear, that was a chain saw.”

*  *  *

Like I said, Pop liked them, and they liked him.

We were up in Robbinsville one time, taking care of  some things before we went to the mountain, gassing up, buying food, getting a tire on an ATV fixed.  John Sullivan, a newspaperman who worked with me in Raleigh, said he’d take care of tire. He didn’t know any more about where to get it fix than I did, but he was in the game, ready to do his part.

I said, “Pop, why don’t you get the tire fixed and John, why don’t you go with him.”

And then I pulled John aside told him, words to this effect, “Don’t say anything. Just listen and learn.”

Pop and John went off somewhere and got the tire fixed. And when they got back I asked John, “Well?”

And he said, “If Pop had had another 15 minutes that guy would have fixed it for free.”

Coming Monday: Hiding In A Privy

Hard Times

In the early 1950’s my Dad went broke.

I’m not sure why, exactly. He was a coal mine owner and the price of coal dropped some, but enough to wipe him out?  I guess so. We talked about that one time and he told me it got to where he couldn’t sell coal for what it cost to uncover it, much less load it and haul it anywhere.

Brother John wrote a 123-page book in the 1980’s about his life and times this is what he said about what happened to the coal business:

“In the early summer of 1952 something occurred that caused us to lose our very lucrative coal contracts with both Republic Steel and Goodyear. We continued to strip coal, thinking that it was only a matter of time until we got this business back, or found some other that would be just as good.”

“What we should have done, the day we lost those contracts, was to shut the place down.  We should have sold every piece of equipment, every truck, every acre of mineral rights and then gone on a long fishing trip.  The problem was that none of us liked to fish; and, in addition, hindsight is always 20/20.”

This building looked a lot better when we lived there, in the two-story apartment on the right.
We lived  in the two-story apartment on the right.

Except for his half-interest in Dixie Dew Syrup, which he hung on to somehow, Dad lost everything. He sold his 102-acre farm outside Gadsden, AL, in the summer of 1951. And by the spring of 1953 his strip mining equipment — dragline, caterpillar, endloader, trucks–were gone, sold or repossessed.  He also had been forced to sell the mineral rights to what he told me was 1,000 acres of waist deep coal.

After he sold the farm we continued to live there for almost six months, paying rent, before moving to town, to a two-story apartment in East Gadsden, 1611 Litchfield Ave.  It was just before Christmas, 1951.  I was 9-years-old, halfway through the fourth grade.

Brother Dave and I both got paper routes, delivering The Gadsden Times, a seven-day-a-week newspaper. He had the Starnes Park Housing Project, I had Litchfield Apartments, where we lived.

The Times was an afternoon paper except for Sunday, which we delivered before breakfast.  One Sunday morning, when it snowed, I put cardboard in my shoes to block the holes. I didn’t think much about it, one way or the other. Isn’t that what everybody did?

I was 10 years old, in the fifth grade, when Momma asked for my paper route money to buy food.  Nobody knew that, but I couldn’t conceal the fact that I had to wear a girl’s coat to school.

On a girl’s coat, the buttons are on the wrong side.

Coming Friday: The Scar