Tag: Dave Stith

Go Tell Daddy What You Did

When I was a boy I came within a nickel of burning down our house.

We lived on a farm near Gadsden, Alabama, and Brother Dave and I went through a fire phase, setting them, playing with them. I was about eight, he was two and a half years older. 

This particular fire, which I unwittingly built near an underground oil tank, was mine alone.  When my little stick fire got into the grass it began to spread and when it reached the oil-soaked ground over the tank it quickly became a big fire.

The farmhouse. It looks a lot better now than it did 65 years ago.
The farmhouse: It looks a lot better now than it did 65 years ago.

I ran into the house, to the kitchen, pushed past my brothers and sisters, filled a frying pan with water, rushed back outside, and threw it on the fire.  And then I ran back inside and got another frying pan full of water.  I never believed it, but a man who worked for Dad and lived in a tenant house nearby, said the flames were taller than our three-story house.

When I ran back inside to get another a third frying pan of water one of my sisters asked me, “What are you doing, Pat?”

I told her.

My brothers and sisters who were home –I had six– rushed outside and the fight was on to keep the fire from spreading to our house. Somebody called the fire department, but we had it out before the firemen arrived.

When Dad got home from Altoona, Alabama, where he mined coal, Marge, my oldest sister, ordered me: “Go tell Daddy what you did!”

So I went to him, stood by his chair, and confessed.

He asked me one question, “Did you help put it out?”

“Yes sir,” I said.

That was all. I was dismissed and he went back to reading his newspaper.

NOTE: One day, when no one else was home, one of Dave’s fires got out of hand and burned up near the house, the syrup factory, and the barn before he and I corralled it. It was touch and go for a while there. Finally, there was only one small flame left.

“Who started this fire?” Dave asked.

“You did,” I said.

And then he swept his broom across the last bit of fire and asked, “Who put it out?”

Coming Monday: Typhoon!

“Get A Gun!” – Part 1 of 2

My second mother –my Dad remarried on Feb. 24, 1949, about 20 months after my first mother died — had gone upstairs to take a bath when I heard a knock on the front door of the farmhouse where we lived, outside Gadsden, AL.

Mother and I had spent the evening playing Canasta. Dad and Brother Dave had gone to a father-son event, the only time I remember my Dad ever doing something like that. He wasn’t that kind of father.

I answered the door, which wasn’t locked, didn’t even have a lock. A man was standing on the porch and he asked me, “Is your Daddy at home?”

“No sir,” I said.

He asked if he could come in and wait on him and I said, “Yes sir.”

I led him to the back living room and he sat down in my Dad’s chair.  I had never seen him before but I knew right then he must not know my Dad very well or he would not have sat in his chair. No one sat my Dad’s chair.

“Who else is here?” he asked.

I said just my mother – she’s taking a bath upstairs — and me. I had forgotten that my brother, Pop, who was 16 or 17 years old and good at fighting, was also upstairs, asleep.

“Just you, your mother, and me,” he said.

And I said, “Yes sir.”

“Go out to my car and get my keys.”

I went outside to his car, parked in our driveway. It smelled like alcohol. I got his keys and went back into the house. He was still sitting in Dad’s chair.

A few minutes later my mother came down the stairs, wearing a green, ankle length robe, and when she saw the man, she stopped on the stairs and told him to leave.

He hesitated and she told him again, “Leave right now!” and he did.

Mother was still shaking when my Dad got home and she told him what had happened.

He was furious.

Vergie Winn Stith and John F. Stith Sr. This photo was made about six years after this incident.
Vergie Winn Stith and John F. Stith Sr. This photo was made about six years after this incident.

My father was a man who took offense easily and liked to fight. He had a blackjack and brass knuckles, which I saw once on the nightstand beside their bed. He had a pistol, too.

He began questioning mother and me.

What did this guy look like? How was he dressed? What kind of car was he driving? What color was it? What, exactly, did he say? Exactly.

And then Dad got on the phone and he started calling people he knew, friends, some of them. Other people too, questioning them. He knew men who lived on the edge of the law, bootleggers, gamblers.

And finally he found the man –I don’t know how– and he got him on the phone.

I heard Dad say, “Get a gun! I’m coming to see you. I’m going to shoot you, and I don’t want it to be murder.”

The man must have said, “You don’t know I look like,” or words to that effect because my Dad replied: “I got a boy who knows what you look like. He going to point at you and I’m going to shoot you.”

I was eight or nine years old.

Continued tomorrow.