Tag: Pop Stith

My Rules

On this trip to Snowbird, our hideaway in the mountains of North Carolina, Brother Pop and I were alone, headed for the cabin in his Ford Ranger pickup.

He had tried several times to get his truck to go into four-wheel drive but it just wouldn’t go. That was OK at first.  But when we got to Big Rock, a little over half a mile from the cabin, he should have just parked it. It had been raining some and when that hill got the least bit wet it was so slick you had to have a four-wheel drive.  That’s all there was to it.

But Pop was determined to drive his truck to the cabin, so he tried again and again to get up the hill.  And the more he tried, the madder he got.  His tires were smoking, and so was he.  I got out, away from his truck, away from him.

Pop kept on trying.  He floor-boarded it.  His tires were screaming.  I just about couldn’t see his truck anymore,  hidden in a  puff of blue smoke coming off his rear tires.

Chuck, top, and Mike Stith
Chuck, top, and Mike Stith

Finally, finally, he gave up and we went on the cabin riding double on an ATV.   Pop didn’t like leaving his truck at Big Rock, not one bit.  He took it personally . He said when his boys, Chuck and Mike, got there that truck was coming up the hill. He made it sound like they were going to beat his truck senseless with a tire tool and drag it up the hill if they had to.

His sons and a couple friends got there the next day and ran into one of my sons, Mark, on the way up.  Mark is the one who got in the Pop’s truck and drove it up the hill to the dam, just below the cabin. Not taking anything away from Mark, but the road had pretty much dried out.  

Lucky for Mark he stopped at the dam and got out to check out the pond and Mike got behind the wheel, only about 50 yards and one enormous mud hole from the cabin. 

He didn’t make it.

Back and forth Mike drove that truck through that mud hole. He would drive it up the hill, guys pushing, tires spinning, slinging mud everywhere, almost there but not quite.  And when the truck could go no further it would slide backwards, back into that mud hole.

On one of those slides back down Mike opened the driver’s door so he could stick his head out and see better. But he was too close to a tree and when the truck slid by the tree it caught the driver’s door and bent it backwards.

Bummer!

Anyway, they finally got the truck out of the mud and up that last little hill and Mike parked it at the cabin. A couple of them pushed on driver’s door, bent it back around, until they finally got it to shut.  While they worked to close to door Chuck told me one of their family rules, a rule that he said applied to situations like that.

What’s the rule? I asked.

“If you’re gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough,” Chuck said.

The Rules
The Rules

Here are my Top Ten.

  1. Never lie to yourself.
  2. Half measures avail nothing.
  3. It’s an ill wind that blows no good.
  4. Sooner or later you get to be known for what you are.
  5. The harder you work the luckier you get.*
  6. If you’re gonna be dumb, you’ve got to be tough.
  7. Never bet another man’s game.*
  8. You never get paid for more than you do until you get caught doing more than you get paid for.*
  9. Get an “est” after your name.*
  10. Pee on problems before you have to call the fire department.* 

*These were Dad’s rules

Postscript:  Was Pop mad about that door? Not at all. He wanted his truck on top of the hill, Mike put it there, and that’s all that mattered.

Coming Monday: Payback

You Think You Can Whip Me?

Dad usually disciplined me and my brothers by whipping us with his belt although he knocked me down once when I was 13 or 14 with a right to my face* because I had disobeyed — I was late coming home.  And I saw him wail on one of my brothers, Pop, with a crutch.

Part of the crutch story was told to me but I saw the wailing part with my own eyes.

Pop ran away from home in 1949, when we lived on a farm near Gadsden, Alabama.  He was 15 years old; I was 7.  Pop went to Chattanooga, Tennessee, and got a job in a cotton mill.

Charles T. (Pop) and John F. Stith Sr. (Dad) Christmas, 1960, about 10 years after the crutch incident.
Charles T. (Pop) Stith and John F. Stith Sr. (Dad), Christmas, 1960, about 10 years after the crutch incident.

Dad made some phone calls, figured out where he was, and sent my oldest brother, John, to bring him home. Dad would have gone himself but he was in the hospital, Jane Greer, one of my sisters, told me. According to the way I heard it, Dad broke a leg when the brakes on a coal truck failed and the truck went over the side of a mountain near Altoona, AL.  According to the way Jane remembers it, Dad was in a jeep that went over the side.  In any event, his leg was broken and he was in the hospital.

John and his wife, Mary, and Jane and her husband, who was also named John, went to Chattanooga, to the cotton mill, to get Pop. But he wouldn’t come.  Pop swung first and he and John fought, Jane said.  The police came and took Pop away, first to jail, and then to a juvenile detention facility, she said. It didn’t have bars, it was more like regular house.

The four of them then drove back to Gadsden and my brother reported to Dad, who, like I said, was in the hospital.

According to Jane, Dad checked out of the hospital and hired an ambulance to take him, Brother John, and Jane’s John back to Chattanooga, about 90 miles.  They arrived at the juvenile detention facility after dark.

Dad identified himself to the fellow in charge of the house and said he had come for his boy.  According to family lore the keeper said he couldn’t have him, that Pop had to go to court because he was a runaway.

“You don’t understand,” Dad told the man.  “We’re not talking about whether I get my boy — I’m going to get him.  What we’re talking about,” pointing to Brother John, “is whether he has to put you on the ground first.”

Now the keeper understood.  Dad got Pop and they rode back to Alabama, I was told, in silence.

I was there when they came in the farmhouse, into what we called the back living room.

“You think you can lick the old man now that I’ve got a broke leg, don’t you,” I heard Dad say to Pop.

“No sir,” Pop replied.

“You think you can, but you can’t.”

He leaned on one crutch, toss the other one in the air, caught it about a third of the way from the bottom, and commenced to whacking Pop with the crutch.

Postscript: Pop revered our father and imitated his mannerisms. Years later Pop and I were up at Snowbird, sitting by the fire outside the  cabin, when he told me: “If I go to hell it’ll be for idol-worshiping Dad.”

*In the 1980’s Brother John wrote a 123-page book about his life and times  in which he recounted an event when he was in the 8th grade and he had to tell Dad, “I was expelled from school for stealing a book.”

“Several seconds passed in silence,” John wrote. “Then his fist crashed into the side of my face and I went sprawling into the middle of the room.”

Coming Monday: Lucky’s Best Story