Category: The Farm

Payback!

I don’t remember what my brother, Pop, had done to me. Kicked me out of bed on a winter night, probably. Pop, Brother Dave and I slept in double bed in the “boys room” at our farm near Gadsden, Alabama, and sometimes Pop made me sleep on the floor. He was eight years older, so there wasn’t much I could do about it.

Or was there?

This is not Pop, or his car. But this is how he started it.
This is not Pop, or his car. But this is how he started it.

Pop had an old car — and I do mean old. I don’t remember the make or model, but I do remember he started it with a hand crank.

I decided to put nails under all four tires, back and front, so no matter which way he went all four tires would be punctured. And then I got to thinking about it and decided that would be too obvious. I’d get caught.

So I picked one tire. I propped nails against the front and back of the tire and covered them with dirt.

It worked. Payback! And he never suspected a thing.

Coming Friday: The Audit

How Times Have Changed

Glencoe Elementary School
Glencoe Elementary School

Every so often I see in the newspaper where kids who go to some school in Wake County, North Carolina, my county, were sent home early because the school’s air conditioner went on the blink.  It was so hot the little darlings couldn’t concentrate.

It used to not be that way.

I started to school in the late 1940s, in Glencoe, Alabama, in a two-story, use-to-be white frame building in bad need of paint.  Air conditioning had been invented but my school didn’t have it. It didn’t have indoor plumbing, either. There were privies outside, one for the boys, one for the girls.

Potbelly stove, courtesy of Museum of Appalachia
Potbelly stove, courtesy of Museum of Appalachia

In the winter, each class room was heated with a potbelly stove, and the stove in my room glowed red hot.

Some of the windows in my third grade classroom had been knocked out and, apparently, there was no money to fix them. So when it got cold the teacher wadded up newspapers and stuffed them in the holes.

The second floor room next to my classroom had burned. How they got the fire out before the whole building went up I’ll never know, but they did. No money to repair it either, apparently, but they didn’t board it up. They just warned us.

“You children stay out of that room,” the teacher said, “or you’ll fall through the floor.”

Coming Monday: Those Mean Old Newspapermen