 
## Out of Kentucky

### By

### Wilson Zaring

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### Published by Glorious Expressions at Smashwords

### Copyright 2012 Wilson Zaring

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Table of Contents

Dedication

Our Zaring Ancestors

Our Miles Ancestors

My First Birthday

Life on the Farm at Stanley

Life in Henry County

We Left the Farm

Uncle Sam Wanted Me

Back to School

Additional Works
Dedicated

### To

### David and Susan
Our Zaring Ancestors

Let me begin this account with a brief summary of our Zaring family history. We are descendants of Johannes Zehrung, who was born at Ritzhausen, Germany, sometime around April 1, 1706. Johannes was a farmer who married three times, twice in Germany, and once in Pennsylvania. His first wife was Anna Marie Crumm, his second was Anna Marie Uhr, and his third was Anna Elizabeth Lotz. Apparently he collected Annas. In 1753, Johannes and family of six emigrated from Germany. I do not know whether this was six plus Johannes or six counting Johannes, but I assume that it was six including Johannes. Only five members of this family have been positively identified in America. They are Johannes and four of his children Henrich, Ludwig, Mathias, and Anna Elizabeth. The sixth person was probably Johannes' second wife, Anna Marie Uhr. In any event, the family arrived in Philadelphia on September 29, 1753, aboard the snow Rowand out of Rotterdam. (A snow is a type of sailing ship.) The arrival of the Rowand was reported in the October 4 edition of Benjamin Franklin's weekly newspaper _The Pennsylvania Gazette._

From 1753 to 1755 there is a gap in the family record. I would love to know where they were and what they did during that time. In 1755, Johannes was living on Indian land on Middle Creek in what is now Snyder County, PA. It was Cumberland County at that time. In October 1755, Indians attacked a settlement a few miles north of Johannes, on Penn's Creek. This settlement, of about 23 people, was destroyed and everyone was killed or captured. Johannes fled to safety, but where he went I do not know. So there is a second gap in the record. In 1760, in Host Church, Berks County, PA, Johannes married Anna Elizabeth Lotz.

In 1765, Johannes filed a claim for his land on Middle Creek. In 1772, he sold this land to John Rush. Johannes died in 1773 at the age of 67. The inventory of his estate shows him in possession of more things than one would need in order to run a household, for example, 3000 needles and 10 dozen boxes of snuff. This inventory suggests that Johannes may have operated a store, or he could have been a peddler who traveled around the area.

We descend from Johannes' son Philip Zehrung, whose mother was probably Anna Marie Uhr. It is a curious fact that except for Philip, I have birth dates for all of Johannes' children, but I do not know where Philip was born or when. He may have been born in Germany, he may have been born in route to America, and he may have been born in Pennsylvania. The earliest record that I have of Philip is an Orphan's Court record in Lancaster County, PA, dated 1773. This record settles Johannes's estate and lists all of his heirs, including our Philip. Why is this an Orphan's Court record? Because at the time of his death Johannes' youngest son, John, was a minor.

There is also a deed on file in Sunbury, PA, dated October 3, 1774, that lists all of Johannes' children. Recall that in 1772, Johannes sold his land on Middle Creek to John Rush. Johannes did not convey title to this land while he was alive, so his children transferred the land after his death. Philip's name, and the names of his brothers and sister, appear on this deed.

Philip married Catherine Zeller. I do not know where and when this marriage took place, but Philip appears to have been on the move. On January 5, 1776, he bought a lot in Fredericksburg, Dauphin County, PA, now Lebanon County. Philip served in the Lancaster County Militia during the Revolution. He appears on the 1790 Federal Census of Pennsylvania as a resident of York County, PA. On December 9, 1794, Philip bought 116 acres of land on Beargrass Creek in Jefferson County, KY, and on August 11, 1795, he bought a lot in Louisville near the Falls of the Ohio. He sold this lot in 1802, and, at a time unknown to me, moved to a farm in what is now Oldham County, KY. This farm was located west of Brownsboro, but I do not know its exact location. Philip died sometime between 1812 and 1815 and is probably buried in a family cemetery on the farm near Brownsboro where he lived. My cousin Alan Zaring and I spent a lot of time searching for Philip's land, his cabin, and his graveyard, but without success.

All of Philip's children adopted the spelling that we now use. Our direct line from Philip is through his son Jacob Zaring, who was born on January 10, 1788, in Pennsylvania and died on August 20, 1820, in Shelby County, at the early age of 32. This information is from an old family Bible that passed from my Aunt Celia (Zaring) Neel to Uncle Charles Zaring, to his son John, and then to my cousin Alan Zaring. Why Jacob died so young I do not know. There is surely a story here if we could find it. Jacob was my great great grandfather and he was the first Zaring to settle in Shelby County.

I grew up thinking of Shelby County as home base for the Zaring family. Exactly when Jacob came to Shelby County I do not know. On August 7, 1809, in Shelby County, Jacob married Christianna Caplinger. They settled on Bull Skin Creek in a little log cabin. You may remember visiting Aunt Tommy Zaring at the family home place. There is a long driveway from her house to the Shelbyville-Smithfield road. If you continue going west in the direction of that driveway, across the Smithfield road, and through the fields for about two miles you would come to the Harrington Mill Road, which runs parallel to the Smithfield Road. As you drive south on this road you come to Bull Skin Creek. Jacob Zaring's log cabin stood on the east side of this road and on the north side of the creek. Several years ago Uncle Charles took me to the site of this old cabin. I have forgotten whether there were remnants of the cabin still left when we visited, but the old Caplinger Cemetery is located nearby on the banks of the creek a few hundred yards west of where the cabin stood. Jacob's wife Christianna (Caplinger) Zaring is buried there. I have seen a footstone with the initials "C.Z." Jacob is probably buried there too, but there is no evidence of this known to me. This cemetery was located on land that the Caplinger family owned at one time. I showed Guthrie and his brother Alan where this old cemetery is.

My great grandfather was Lawson William Zaring. He was a very frugal man, perhaps the word is stingy. My grandfather is reported to have said that even when he left home to attend school in Shelbyville, he had great difficulty getting his father to give him a quarter. With Lawson William, the Zaring family rose to some prominence as successful farmers and landowners. Lawson was born on December 20, 1817, died on February 27, 1896, and is buried in the Grove Hill Cemetery at Shelbyville. Lawson was the first owner of the farm and home that was known in the family as the Zaring place, near Finchville. He bought this 175-acre farm on October 13, 1856, when it was auctioned "at the court house door" in Shelbyville. It was previously owned by William Finley. The Finleys were well-to-do and it is thought that they built the old brick home that stood on the south side of Interstate 64 near the Shelbyville exit. Aunt Celia thought that it was built about ten years before Lawson bought it. If so, it was built about 1846. My cousin Guthrie thinks the architecture is identical to other houses in the area that were built as early as 1805. No matter, in spite of the fact that this old home was on the Kentucky Historical Register, it was torn down in 1998 after my cousin Roy Neel sold the farm to a developer.

On April 23, 1846, in Shelby County, Lawson married Elizabeth Ann Boyd. According to Uncle Charles, her parents disapproved of their marriage on the grounds that the Zarings were poor and would never amount to anything. Elizabeth lived on the farm that is known to older generations in the family as the Boyd place but now is referred to as the home place. That is where Aunt Tommy lived. It is located on the Shelbyville-Smithfield Road. In 1846, the home was a double log cabin. One night Elizabeth climbed out of a cabin window and eloped with Lawson.

According to Uncle Charles, Lawson resented his in-law's attitude and was determined to prove them wrong. Whether this drive made him frugal or it was his nature, I do not know, but his goal was realized. As pointed out above, Lawson acquired the Zaring place near Finchville in 1856. When Elizabeth's parents died, the Boyd farm was divided among several heirs into pieces that were too small to farm. Bit by bit, Lawson bought up these small plots from the heirs. It took him 12 years to get it all, but he did.

My grandfather was Jacob Lawson Zaring. He was born on February 25, 1868, at the old Zaring place, where I was born. He died on June 6, 1930, at home, on the old Boyd place. Jacob married Zelma Coots, who was born on July 11, 1874, in Daviess County, KY, and died on July 12, 1946, in Shelbyville. They are buried in the Grove Hill Cemetery. They had five children. Let me tell you a bit about them so your will know about your aunts, uncles, and cousins.

The oldest child was Lawson Dewitt Zaring who was known as L.D. He married Freeman Allen and they had two children, Jacob Allen and Rebecca Hackworth. Uncle L.D. served in World War I in France. He and Aunt Freeman once ran an inn in Shelbyville. At one time I thought they ran the Old Stone Inn in Simpsonville, but others in the family, who were in a better position to know than I, told me otherwise.

The second child, and only daughter, was Cecelia Elizabeth Zaring, who was known as Celia. She married Urban LeRoy Neel, who was known as Roy. They had a son, Roy Fielding, who was known as Roy Jr., in spite of the fact he had a different name than his father. Uncle Roy and Aunt Celia lived in the old Zaring home near Finchville. Roy Jr. served in World War II as a First Lieutenant in the Fourth Infantry Division. He landed on Normandy Beach on D-day plus 3, and was wounded in Germany, in the battle of Hurtgen Forest. Roy Jr. received the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart.

The third child was Jacob Malcolm Zaring, who was known to friends and relatives as Mac. He married Dorothy Brown and they had two sons Jacob Malcolm Jr., who is known as Sonny, and Clarence Brown, who is known as Brownie. Uncle Malcolm and Aunt Dorothy lived in a big brick home on the Eminence road just out of Shelbyville. The local golf course was on their farm.

The fourth child was my father, Wilson Coots Zaring. He fits in here, but we will talk about him later.

The fifth Child was Boyd Winchester Zaring. He married Elizabeth Thomas Snider and they had Lawson Winchester and Ben Guthrie. I am sure that you remember Aunt Tommy and her two grandsons Guthrie and Alan. We visited them when you were young. Uncle Boyd and Aunt Tommy lived in the old home place on the Smithfield road.

Sixth and last was Charles Thomas Zaring, the youngest child. He was only ten years older than I. He married Esther Katherine Burk. They had Bettie Burk, who changed her name to Shasta, and John Charles. Uncle Charles and Aunt Esther lived in a log cabin on the Burks Branch road out of Shelbyville. You remember them from our visits. Uncle Charles served in World War II in the US Army Air Force. Shasta's former husband's notorious career is told in the book _Bluegrass Conspiracy._

I was only about two the last time I saw Grandfather before he died, so I do not remember him at all. He was the first Zaring to live at the old Boyd place. After he married Grandmother, they moved in with Lawson William in the old Zaring home near Finchville. Aunt Dorothy was close to Grandmother who told her things that Aunt Dorothy passed on to me. For example, when Grandmother and Grandfather moved in, the walls of the old Zaring home were kalsomined. Kalsomine is a kind of whitewash. Grandmother was sure that nothing had been done to the walls since "Mrs. Zaring" died and probably much earlier. Grandmother wanted to clean the walls and paper them, but Lawson William told her in no uncertain terms that was a waste of money. As he put it, you can't eat wallpaper, you can't wear it, and you can't spend it.

I do not know when Grandmother and Grandfather moved to the Boyd place on the Shelbyville road. Knowing my Grandmother, it is hard for me to believe that she moved into a log cabin, but I guess she did. According to Uncle Charles, about 1911, Grandfather had the cabin covered and gave the home its present look. This was done in such a way that little evidence of the cabin-within was visible, except for the fireplace. I find it easy to believe that Grandmother wanted none of it to show. There was a front porch that Aunt Tommy had removed and I don't know why, possibly termite damage. I have no idea how old the cabin is, but it surely dates back to the early 1800s. The cabin is older than the Smithfield road, which is on the west side of the cabin. There was an older Shelbyville road that ran just east of the cabin, between the house and the barn. The cut of this old road can still be seen in the land. The old barn is still standing. It is put together with pegs, so it was built before nails were readily available. Guthrie wanted very much to keep the old home and farm in the family, but Guthrie's father Ben and his Uncle Lawson could not agree, so part of the farm was sold. The home, plus some land, remains in the family and is owned by my cousin Ben.

My father was Wilson Coots Zaring. In the family he was known as Coots. He was born on June 20, 1900, at home, i.e., the Boyd place, and died on October 6, 1956, at LaGrange, Oldham County, KY. On December 23, 1922, in Shelbyville, he married my mother, Susie Fontain Miles. She was born on April 17, 1898, at home, in Daviess County, KY, and died on May 27, 1989, in Urbana, Champaign County, IL. They are both buried in the Grove Hill Cemetery near Shelbyville. Both were born in log cabins, so someone should have become president. Let me briefly review your Miles ancestors.

Our Miles Ancestors

The first in the Miles line that we know about is Samuel Miles. Samuel is still very much a mystery to me. Some sources say he was born in the USA, others say he was an immigrant. I do not know where he was born or when. The earliest date we have for him is August 20, 1760, when he was issued a marriage license in Pennsylvania. He married Sarah James, daughter of Isaac James. They had a large family. The oldest children are reported to have been born in Baltimore, but I question that. Most of his children were reported to have been born in Henry County, VA. My guess is they were all born there. Samuel served in the American Revolution as a gunsmith in the Fifth Virginia Regiment. How long he was in Henry County I do not know, but there are sources that claim he moved from Franklin County, VA, to Woodford County, KY, at an unspecified date. Franklin County was formed from Henry and other counties in 1785. Samuel finally settled in Shelby County, KY, and there he died in April 1811.

We descend from Samuel's son Evan F. Miles who was born on December 21, 1778, in Henry County, VA, and died on January 13, 1871, in Rock County, WI. He married Mary Christie, daughter of James Christie and Sarah Lemmon. James Christie was also a Revolutionary War soldier. Evan and Sarah Miles had a large family. Their youngest child Hezekiah was my great grandfather.

Hezekiah Miles was born on November 21, 1821, in Ripley County, IN, and died on July 21, 1821, in Daviess County, KY. He married Josephine Strickland. They are both buried in the Scherer Cemetery, in Stanley, KY. (As best I remember the clock that Sue has is from the Strickland family.) They had five children. The first three were born in Ripley County and the last two in Crawford County, IN. In 1869, Hezekiah moved his family to Daviess County and opened a blacksmith shop at Grissom's Landing on the Ohio River.

Hezekiah and Josephine died in 1875, less than five months apart. I do not know the cause of their death, but their oldest daughter, Amanda Isabel, took responsibility for keeping the family together. She was known as Aunt Belle. The youngest child, Thomas Corwin, was only 15, when his parents died. Both Aunt Belle and Uncle Tom were around when I was little. I remember people talking about them, but I don't remember either of them. The fourth child in this family was my Grandfather Ezra Lafayette. He was Grandpa to me.

Ezra Lafayette Miles was born on February 14, 1858, at Alton, in Crawford County, IN, and died on October 10, 1944, at home, near Stanley, in Daviess County, KY. On April 19, 1882, in the Old Oakford Methodist Church, near Stanley, Ezra married Sarah Catherine Sheffer. Grandma was born on February 22, 1864, in Morganfield, Union County, KY, and died on August 31, 1937, at home, near Stanley. They are both buried in the Scherer Cemetery at Stanley. Grandma and Grandpa had nine children so let me review all of those aunts, uncles, and cousins.

The oldest was Estella Leigh Miles, who married Edgar William Fuqua. Aunt Stella and Uncle Edgar lived on a farm south of Stanley. They had three children, Thurman Miles, Lucille, and Arthur Lafayette. Thurman served in the US Navy during World War II aboard the USS Northampton, a heavy cruiser. The Northampton was in the Battle of Tassafaronga. A Japanese naval group was attempting to re-enforce their troops on Guadalcanal. It was late at night when a US naval force, that included the Northampton, launched a surprise attack that prevented the Japanese from completing their mission. However the Northampton was hit by two torpedoes and was forced to abandon ship. The Northampton listed so badly that lifeboats could not be lowered on one side. Thurman had a buddy who couldn't swim, so Thurman told him they would go over together. A rescue ship stood by and at great risk turned on its lights. Thurman said that ship looked like it was a mile away. He was swimming and towing his buddy. His buddy said, "Thurman don't you think we should stop and pray?" Without missing a stroke, Thurman said. "Let's wait till we get over on that ship."

Amelia Isabelle Miles married Ira Gordon Dunn. They had no children. To me she was Aunt Piggy. All of her brothers and sisters called her Piggy. I am not sure why. Mother told me about someone riding a pig when they were small. That may be where she got the name. Aunt Piggy always referred to her husband as Mr. Dunn, and to me he was Uncle Dunn. They ran a grocery store in Madisonville.

James William Miles married Isabel Theresa Scherer. They had James William Jr. and Dorothy Louise. Uncle Jim and Aunt Isabel ran a general store in Henderson, KY, and later one in Madisonville. The store in Madisonville burned. I remember seeing the ruins. James Jr. was with the US Army Air Force 101st Airborne and fought from the Normandy landing all the way to the end of the war in Germany.

Louella Miles married William Edward Pheifer. They had five children, James William, Miles Lee, Pauline, James Harold, and Raymond Miles. James William and Miles Lee were twins who only lived a few months. Harold served in the US Navy aboard the USS Boise a light cruiser. They sank three Japanese ships and assisted in the sinking of three others in the Battle of Cape Espreance. See _With All Our Might, The WWII History of the USS Boise._ Following her husband's death Aunt Louella married J. Ernest Chaney. Everyone called him Chaney and I called him Uncle Chaney. Tragedy plagued this family. They first lived in a tenant house on the back of Grandpa's farm. When the twins where about three months old, they became very ill. The doctor came and prescribed, but his instructions were misunderstood. The twins died of an overdose. When Raymond was a boy he found a dynamite cap. I think this was also at Grandpa Miles' place. Raymond held the cap in his left hand and picked at it with something. The cap exploded and ripped off his thumb and the first two fingers. When Pauline's oldest son, Quay Jr., was high school age, he wanted to fly. Aunt Louella bought him a small plane. He was doing stunts, crashed, and was killed.

John Preston Miles married Ruth Vanada and had John Preston Jr., William Joseph, who was known as Billie, and Doris. Uncle Preston and Aunt Ruth ran a grocery store in Madisonville. Later they farmed west of Grandpa's place on the Laketown Road.

Georgie Francis Miles married William Walker Gregory. Aunt Georgia and Uncle Walker had no children. They lived on a farm on the Laketown Road.

Kathleen Miles married Charles A. Saalwaechter and adopted a son Jack Miles. Uncle Charlie worked for Gunther's hardware store in Owensboro. When I was about six, he gave me two cap pistols that I treasured

My mother Susie Fontain Miles fits in here but we will say more about her below.

Donnie Eunice Miles married William Jefferson Dawson. They had two children, Katherine May and William Miles, who was know as Billie. Aunt Donnie and Uncle William lived on the farm just west of Grandpa on the Laketown Road. I used to play with Billie. He was in the US Navy in World War II.

My First Birthday

My mother was a schoolteacher. Her first job was in the one room schoolhouse at Laketown. I never attended there, but I remember the school. I am not sure how long she taught there but I think it may have been only one year. She was offered a job in Graefenburg, a small town east of Shelbyville in Shelby County. There she met and later married my father.

Mother and Dad's marriage was plagued by two basic problems. Dad was an alcoholic who had a serious drinking problem until about 1941. The second problem was that Mother did not like her mother-in-law. Mother thought that they were going to live in Uncle George's house on Maple Street in Shelbyville, but after they married, Dad, who tended to do things and explain only when compelled to do so, told her that the house was rented and they would have to live with Grandfather and Grandmother at the Boyd place. Mother liked Grandfather, whom she saw as a kind and gentle man, but Grandmother was another matter. According to Mother, Grandmother Zaring was domineering and demeaning. After a while, I don't know how long, Uncle George's house in Shelbyville became available and they moved in. They were hardly settled in when the house caught fire and burned down. In those days everyone raised chickens. If you did not have setting hens then you bought chicks, but you had to have a brooder to keep them warm. The fire was thought to have started with the brooder, which was on the back porch. Dad had taken out insurance on the house and contents the day before the fire.

With Uncle George's house destroyed, there was nothing to do but go back to the Boyd place and live with my grandparents. I don't know how long they were there this time, but soon Mother decided she had had enough and she went home to her folks in Stanley. How long she stayed in Stanley, I do not know, but Dad, and I think Grandfather, went to Stanley to ask her to come home. Grandfather agreed that they could live at the Zaring place near Finchville.

I was born on November 9, 1926, in the old Zaring home. Mother kept the shades drawn in my room to protect my eyes and carried me around on a pillow. We lived there until I was about two. Mother left Dad and took me home with her to Stanley. I don't remember anything of our life at the Zaring place except what I have been told. For example, we had a dog called 'Sport'. Dad had an old Model A and old Sport would ride on the running board as Dad drove around the community, at least he did until Dad turned a corner too fast and threw him off. He never got back on. There are pictures of me and old Sport around here some place. I don't remember Sport. The first dog I remember was Speed, so called because he was fast.

The Zaring place was a dairy farm with lots of cows to milk. Cows have to be milked twice a day. At milking time the cows have to be rounded up and driven to the barn. My Dad thought it was cute to take me along and teach me all of the farm hand profanity. For example, to drive a cow you say "Huhie, you old bitch." When I got to Stanley and my Grandma Miles heard this from the mouth of a two-year-old, she was not impressed and immediately instituted correctional procedures. No, she didn't spank me; she simply and kindly explained the error of my ways. I don't remember any of this; Mother told me. Dad soon joined us and we all lived with Grandma and Grandpa until March 1934, when I was seven.

Life on the Farm at Stanley

My earliest recollections date back to Daviess County when I could not have been more than three years old. I think we were at Aunt Stella's, but I am not sure of that. What I remember very vividly is seeing a black man, the first black person I had ever seen. I walked up to him and said "Don't you ever wash." I was sure that with a little soap and water, he would clean up and look just like the rest of us. I know that I embarrassed him, indeed I remember the expression on his face and his tone as he said, "Of course I do." He had no idea why I asked. My Dad thought this was hilarious. The reason I think this was at Aunt Stella's is that we were by a well with a chain pump. No such well existed at Grandpa Mile's place. Aunt Stella also had a turkey gobbler that used to chase me. I remember him quite well.

I remember Grandpa's sorghum mill and a bit about the process of making sorghum molasses. I didn't like molasses, but I loved the juice of the cane from which sorghum was made, so I would go out when sorghum was being made, get a piece of cane, and chew on it for the juice. Sorghum making is interesting. I called the equipment a mill, but I am not sure that is what it was really called. It had two parts, the press that squeezed the juice from the cane, and the cooking table where the molasses was made. As I recall the press was turned by a mule that walked round and round in a circle. The cane was fed into the press where it went between two rollers that squeezed the juice out. As I remember it, the juice flowed onto the cooking table but that must be wrong because I don't see how the juice could flow to the table with that mule walking around and getting in the way. Maybe the juice was carried to the table.

The table was especially designed with baffles that made the juice flow along the side of the table in a section that was perhaps a foot wide. The juice then flowed into the next section of the table and back to the other side of the table where it entered the next section. Back and forth it flowed until at last it came to the end of the last section. The juice flowed in at one corner of the table and the finished sorghum was collected at the diagonally opposite corner. As the juice cooks, a green froth forms, rises to the top, and is skimmed off. These skimmings are tossed into a pit that is dug in the ground beside the cooking table. I stepped into the skimming pit one day. I couldn't get out and had to be lifted up. I remember that pit as being wide and deep. Years later we were in the area, and I stopped along the way to watch people making sorghum. The skimming pit was about a foot across and maybe three inches deep. Things shrink as you get older.

When I was very young, children were told frightening things to keep them in line. There was a boogieman that would get you if you didn't watch out. He might live under a bridge or who knows where. I was also told about horrible things that come out at night. In fact, I was so frightened of things in the dark that I was afraid to sleep on my back. I was afraid that I would open my eyes and see a monster. I learned to sleep on my stomach with my face buried in the pillow. It was a great relief when I grew up and discovered that there are no ghosts or goblins or boogiemen, but to this day I am still nervous in the dark.

I addressed my two grandmothers differently. It was Grandma Miles and Grandmother Zaring. I remember Grandmother Zaring always being neatly dressed and reserved. She wasn't unfriendly, but I never felt close to her as I did with Grandma. For me "Grandmother" was always a formal term of address. I have fond memories of Grandma Miles. She was warm, friendly, caring, and only got dressed up to go to church. Consequently, for me "Grandma" was a term of affection, but not for Mother. Although she called her mother "Ma", she did not like that name. When David was old enough to talk, I referred to Mother as "Grandma" and she explained in no uncertain terms that she was not going to be Grandma.

I have many memories of life on the farm at Stanley. Grandma and Grandpa were very very old. Almost as old as I am now. Life on a farm begins very early in the morning. I can remember getting up early and going downstairs. Everyone would be up and busy with breakfast. I would go to Grandma and Grandpa's bedroom, which was near the kitchen, and climb into their bed. It was a featherbed and until it was made, there would be an imprint in the feather mattress of the last occupants. Being larger than I, Grandma and Grandpa would make a deeper impression. I loved to climb in where they had lain; frequently it would still be warm. I would nestle into a warm spot and go back to sleep.

I always looked forward to summer and the opportunity to go bare-foot. The Laketown Road ran in front of Grandpa's house. This was a dirt road and when the weather was hot and dry, the dirt would become warm, dry powder. In some places it would be two or three inches deep. It felt so warm, and soft, and good on your feet. It was like liquid and it would squirt up between your toes as you walked through it.

My cousin Billy Dawson was about two years older than I. He lived on the farm just west of us on the Laketown Road. I used to go to his house to play. I was about three, I guess. We would play until suddenly I needed to go to the bathroom. They had an outhouse. I wasn't sure how to use that, so I would start running down the Laketown Road toward home; I never made it. At Billy's there was a persimmon tree that we would climb and eat persimmons. You had to wait until after the first frost before they were good. Before that, they would make your mouth pucker. Billy's dad, Uncle William, was a very inventive man. He did all kinds of things. He build a full basement under his house, installed his own running water system, and one year he grew celery. He just did things other people didn't do. He put up the first electric fence in the area. Billie and I would grab the wire and hang on. I remember seeing a dog lift his leg to a fence post. He got quite a surprise.

Even at a very early age I had the run of the farm. One day, I was out with old Speed. Speed caught a rabbit and killed it, so I took it home. Mother said I was so little I couldn't even hold the rabbit up high enough to keep it from dragging the ground. That is pretty small. I don't really remember that story; it is one Mother told me. I do remember once getting down into a drainage ditch and not being able to get out because the banks were so high. Finally a neighborhood heard me screaming, came and pulled me out. I remember that ditch as being 6 or 8 feet deep; it was well over my head. Years later, when we were back for a visit, I noticed that ditch was about three feet deep. Things shrink as you age.

It is difficult to imagine how different life is now as compared with life on the farm near Stanley in the 1930's. Let me tell you a bit about Grandpa and then we will talk about life then.

Grandpa was young when his parents died. When he grew up, he earned his living managing land, much of which was in timber. Grandpa cleared the land, sold the lumber, dynamited the stumps, and prepared the ground for farming. In 1903, Grandpa bought the old Mason farm, consisting of 808 acres. It was located about two and a half miles west of Stanley on the Laketown Road. A year later, he sold half of the farm for what he paid for the entire thing. In one year, he owned a 404-acre farm free and clear. About half of this farm was Ohio River bottomland. Grandpa raised corn, tobacco, and hogs and shipped his produce to market by steamboat. Riverboats stopped at a point on his farm known as Miles Landing. These boats carried his produce to market. Grandpa also owned a store in Stanley. I remember Grandpa as a kind man, but an older cousin, James Miles, who was old enough to work, thought of him as a hard taskmaster.

Grandpa was a good provider and took good care of his family. The original Miles home was a double log cabin that sat on the edge of the woods. There was a black family that worked on Grandpa's farm and around the house. The woman's name was Alley. Mother remembered Alley fondly. Alley cooked and looked after the kids. I don't remember Alley's husband's name. They lived in a cabin in the woods. The woods were gone long before I came along. All that remained where the pecan trees that Grandpa saved. Mother also remembered with pride the family merry-go-round, which was powered by the riders who pedaled. I think four could ride at the same time. It stood in the yard but had a building that enclosed it and protected it from the weather. It was gone by the time I was born.

The old cabin burned in 1916, and Grandpa built a new red brick home that was still standing the last I knew. This was a very modern home in its day, with central heating, electric lights, and indoor plumbing. Water was from a well in the basement. Electric lights were powered by a large bank of batteries in the basement that were charged by a Delco generator.

Water was easy to find in this area. The soil was sandy and the water table was only 20 or 30 feet below the surface of the ground. All you had to do was drive a pipe in the ground, down to the water table, and put a pump on it. There was a special point that you put on the end of the pipe so you could drive it. This point was porous so that the water could flow into the pipe. All of the good things of the Miles home were still there when I was a boy. We would be sitting around the house at night and the lights would begin to flicker. Grandma would get out the oil lamps and Dad would go to the basement to start the generator. In a few minutes the lights would come back on and Grandma would put the lamps away.

We had a party line telephone. The phone was mounted on the wall and had a crank on the side. When you turned the crank every phone on the party line rang. Everyone on the line had their own special ring, like two long rings and a short. So when you heard the phone ring, even if it wasn't for you, you knew that someone on the line was getting a call. There was a lot of eavesdropping on other people's conversation. We also had a radio, with which we listened to Amos and Andy.

In the 1930s, this part of the country was still in the horse and buggy days. Mr. Burns delivered the mail in an old green closed buggy. When the mail buggy went by, my cousin, Billy Dawson, and I would run in behind it and swing on the axle for a short ride. We were sure that Mr. Burns didn't know we were there because he was in the closed cab and could not see us, but I rather think he knew. Most people had an outhouse instead of a bathroom and water was carried into the house from an outdoor well

Aunt Stella would come to visit in her buggy and sometimes she would take me home with her. I loved to visit her because she would give me biscuits with butter and sugar. And she would play Parcheesi with me. If I won, she would give me a bag of marbles as a prize. I am sure she gave me the prize even if I didn't win. I didn't like to ride in her buggy. The old horse would froth at the mouth and it seemed to me that no matter which way we were going the wind blew the froth from the horse's mouth back in my face; I didn't like that.

I loved chocolate, and when we went to town, I usually got a nickel with which to buy candy. In those days they did not have individually wrapped candy bars. The stores had large hunks of Hershey chocolate. It wasn't the soft milk chocolate we have today, which would have melted on warm days, but it was good. For a nickel they would chip off chunks with an ice pick and put them in a sack. There was also a Nehi chocolate drink that I thought was great. When we went to Madisonville to visit Uncle Preston or Aunt Piggy, who each ran a store, I would get a Nehi chocolate and when they came, they would bring me one. Naturally I looked forward to their visits.

Grandpa did quite well as a young man, but he was wiped out by the depression. For people on the farm, the economy went bad a few years before the stock market crash of 1929. Mother said that Grandpa was also wiped out by his kids, who asked for financing for various projects that all failed. Grandpa could not say "No" to his children. As you two know I never had that problem, you each had to make your own way in the world and all borrowed money had to be repaid. But Grandpa mortgaged his farm and almost lost it because he could not make the payments. The farm was saved when Roosevelt closed the banks in 1933. Although Grandpa acknowledged that Roosevelt saved his farm, he remained a Republican all of his life. Grandfather Zaring weathered the Depression better than Grandpa Miles.

Not only were the people in this part of the country in the horse and buggy days, so also was medical practice. Wonder drugs did not exist, and the ability of physicians left something to be desired. I used to have nightmares. I had bizarre dreams that I can still remember but cannot describe. They were nonrepresentational and terrorizing. I remembered the weird sounds associated with these nightmares until I was grown, and when I recalled that sound, I got very nervous. When I had a nightmare I would scream so loudly that I woke the entire household. Everyone would be up rocking me and trying to settle me down. Frequently I would not even wake up, so I didn't even know it happened until the next day when someone told me about it. A doctor told my parents that I had epilepsy. Recently I learned that these episodes are called "night terrors". They happen to lots of children and no one knows the cause.

When I was very young, maybe two or three, I had a hydrocele and Mother took me to the doctor. The treatment in those days was iodine injection. The doctor told mother she would have to leave the room. Mother said that when the doctor injected the iodine, you could have heard me yell in the next county. I haven't liked doctors since. Haven't been too fond of iodine either. I don't remember any of this, Mother told me about it many years later.

There were several men who worked for Grandpa. Some of them lived in tenant houses on the back of the farm, away from the river. The men would sometimes collect around the garage and talk. They also had a weight that they used for exercise. It wasn't a dumbbell but a milk bottle shaped hunk of iron with a bail type handle. The men would lift it with one hand. Raise it to their shoulder then lift it over their head to the other shoulder. My recollection was that it was a fifty-pound weight, but that is clearly not possible. One day when no one was around, I went out to the garage to do what I had seen the men do. I took hold of the weight and tried to lift it. I can remember to this day the strain in my right shoulder as I struggled to get that thing off the floor. I thought my right arm was going to pull off at the shoulder, but I was determined to lift that weight. I got it off the floor maybe an inch. That's all I remember. I ruptured myself. In those days they did not have corrective surgery for ruptures. Well, they probably did have such procedures, but our family believed that surgery should be avoided if possible. I was fitted with a truss. I wore that truss until I was about seven and broke it. We did not have it replaced and I never had a problem afterward. That is not quite correct. I had trouble if I picked up something when Mother was around. She would say "Now that's too heavy for you." Dad was ruptured as an adult and wore a truss all of his life. I never asked him how it happened. Oh, now I remember, Mother said he did it lifting a milk can. The old Zaring place was a dairy. I probably mentioned that.

I once had scarlet fever. I can remember being in bed and Mom and Dad bringing we a sack of chocolate. They told me not to eat it all and share it with others. So I hide it under my pillow, ate it all, and didn't share it with anyone. When I recovered from scarlet fever, I had a bad case of tonsillitis. The doctor told my folks that my tonsils had to come out, but I would not survive the surgery. Grandma did not believe in surgery anyway and had them take me to a chiropractor, I think his name was Dr. Kinchloe. I may be misremembering this because it is hard to believe that a chiropractor would prescribe the treatment that he did. He reduced my tonsils with x-rays. I can remember lying under the x-ray machine, scared to death. In those days, children just did what they were told and didn't ask questions. I learned, within the past ten years, that many people had x-ray treatment for tonsils and some of them now have thyroid cancer as a result. My thyroid is OK.

Half of Grandpa's farm was river bottomland that flooded every year. River bottomland was great for corn. Grandpa raised corn on the same ground for years without fertilizing or rotating crops. Every year the river would overflow and lay down a layer of rich fertile silt for next year's crop. One time when the river was up, Dad and Mr. Johnson, a tenant farmer, took me and rowed out to some ground that was surrounded by the high water. We took Speed along. He was a good old dog. Speed loved to hunt rabbits. We rowed out to this island and Speed jumped out of the boat. He had hardly hit ground when a rabbit jumped up. Speed began the chase. Suddenly, another rabbit jumped up and then another and another. There were so many rabbits that Speed didn't know which one to chase. When we rowed back, I went to sleep and almost fell out of the boat. I barely remember this. Most of it is from what Dad told me.

Grandpa used mules to farm. Plowing was done with mules, no-till was unheard of in those days. Corn was shucked in the field by hand. A wagon, with a deep bed, was pulled through the field by two mules. One side of the wagon had a high board attached, maybe three feet high, called a bounce board. The mules would stop and start with oral commands. It is interesting that there were different words used to drive different animals. To drive a cow you say, "Huhie!". Some folk added something to that. To drive a pig you say, "Suie". To drive a chicken you say "Shew". To drive a horse you say, "Giddy up". To stop a horse you say, "Whoa". You can't stop a cow, pig, or chicken so no one tries. To get a horse to turn right you yell, "Gee" and to get him to turn left you yell, "Haw".

Well back to shucking corn. There would be one man and one wagon. The man walked beside the wagon shucking the corn and throwing the ears into the wagon. The bounce board was to keep the ears from flying over the wagon and falling on the ground on the other side. You would probably shuck four rows at a time so you might be throwing corn from six or eight feet away. A good man could shuck 100 bushels a day. There were two different shucking tools that were used, a corn peg and a corn hook. Your Grandmother Zaring bought a corn peg at a flea market a few years ago. I wonder what happened to it. Each of these tools was used to pull the shucks open so that you could grab the ear, twist it off, and toss it into the wagon. Some men preferred the peg and some preferred the hook.

Dad was a great storyteller. He loved to tell the story of a man who could shuck so fast that he could keep an ear in the air all the time. He got so good that he decided that with a little more work he could get two ears in the air at the same time. People came from miles around to see him set this record. He started shucking and going faster and faster and he almost had it when he dropped an ear. He reached down to pick it up, grabbed his foot, threw himself into the wagon, and the second ear hit him right in the head.

I don't remember how many mules Grandpa had but there were lots. There were big ones and little ones. I remember two of the small mules, one was named Jenny and one was named Pete. Jenny was my favorite. She was gentle and I was permitted to ride her. But Pete was mean. He would bite, so you had to be careful around Pete. Mules fight, and when they do they rear up in the air on their hind legs, paw at each other, and bite. On the farm everyone said "rare up", as in "He would rare up on his hind legs." "Rear up" sounded like the wrong end came up. I remember that one morning when the men went to the barn to start the day's work, they found one mule dead. He had reared up and come down on a stall stanchion. The post went in his stomach and all the way to his backbone. He was hanging there with his front feet off the ground. They had to cut the post down to get him off. Death on the farm was part of life. We killed chickens and hogs for food, but this was different. I remember seeing that poor old mule hanging on that post.

As early as I can remember Grandpa was too old to work. That bothered him. I can remember him saying, "I just ain't worth nothing." For Grandpa, work was how you showed your worth. Grandpa was a very gentle and temperate man. "By jicks" was the height of invective for him. He drove an old Chevy. On the highway he would get up to 35 mph. One day he was driving along, looked down at the odometer, and he was going 50. "By jicks, I better get this thing slowed down." He started driving before stoplights were installed in Owensboro. Mother said he never stopped at a red light if no one was coming. He thought that was foolish.

That old Chevy had mechanical brakes and mechanical brakes were only slightly better than opening the door and dragging your foot. One evening, my cousin Thurman and Dad decided that they would drive to the river and check the trotlines. Trotlines are fishing lines that you throw out in the river with lots of baited hooks. You tied the line to one end of a strong willow rod and you pushed the other end deep into the riverbank. When you had a fish on the line, the willow rod would bend under the pull of the fish. Grandpa's house was located on a rise above the Laketown Road. There was another road that ran perpendicular to the Laketown Road that went from the house to the river. It also went the other direction to the back of the farm. There was, by my memory, a steep hill beside the house where the road went down to the Laketown Road, with a high dirt bank beside the road that blocked your view to the right. Actually it was a gentle slope and a low bank. Yes, indeed, things do shrink as you get older. As we started down the drive, Thurman saw a car coming down the Laketown Road. He pushed on the brakes as hard as he could, but he could not hold the car on that little hill. I remember Dad saying, "I think you can make it." He didn't. Thurman pored on the gas. We got exactly to the middle of the Laketown Road and were hit broadside. Dad and Thurman were in the front and I was in the back seat. We were hit on the right side and I was thrown against the right side of the car, raising a big knot on the right side of my head, bounced to the other side of the car where I obtained a symmetric knot, on the left side of my head. Of course, I yelled like I was being killed. Grandma heard the crash, heard me yell, and about had a heart attack. No one was seriously hurt. In those days cars were made of real metal. As best I remember both cars drove away. We didn't check the trotlines that evening. I remember another time when Mother and I drove over to the river and the old willow was bending under the pull of a fish. We pulled the line in and caught a big fish that we took home and ate.

Food was important, especially during the Depression. One day Dad found some grass sacks in the barn with chickens in then. Some one was stealing chickens. So Dad and some others lay in wait the next night for some one to come and pick up their chickens. No one came, so they rigged a shotgun in the hen house in such a way that when the door was opened, the gun would go off. Sure enough the next night the gun went off and everyone ran to the hen house not sure if they hoped to see someone was shot or they hoped not to see someone was shot. No one was. In fact, the hen house door was not even open. It was conjectured that a hen flew into the string that had been rigged and set off the shotgun. I don't think it was left a second night for fear that someone would get killed.

My Dad was a harsh disciplinarian and I dreaded his spanking. He didn't spank me often, but when he did he made quite an impression. It seemed to me that I had a perverse habit of doing something thoughtlessly and stupidly, and the instant I did it a wave of cold terror would radiate up and down my spine as I realized there would be serious repercussions. I never understood why I couldn't think of that before I did it. One day when I was about five, my cousin Jack Saalwaechter and I were in the barn that stood directly behind the house about 100 yards. A car was parked in the barn; I think it was Mr. Johnson's. I picked up a stick and knocked the headlight out. Don't ask we why. I don't know. The moment that glass broke that wave of terror ran up and down my spine. Just then someone, probably Mr. Johnson, came in the barn door. Jack and I headed out the back door and ran for the house, with Mr. J. in pursuit. There was no way of escaping the fact that one of us had broken the light. Jack said that I did it and I said that he did it. Mother said, "Well my boy never lies." So Jack got a whipping and I didn't. That bothered my conscious but not enough that I ever confessed.

Each summer we had a garden that was located behind the house. It seemed to me that I was always being sent to the garden to get an onion, usually at a time when I had something else that I wanted to do, so I got this great idea. I would go to the garden, pull all of the onions, cut the tops off, and put them in the weeds. Then, when someone said, go get an onion, I would dash to the garden, grab an onion from my pile of pre-pulled, pre-topped ones, and be back in the house in a twinkle. Well, the project was going quite well until Grandpa caught me. By the time he got there, I had pulled about all of the onions in the garden. There was a coal bucket full. That is a lot of onions. Grandpa was not at all happy. I remember Mother saying, "Shall I spank you or do you want to wait until your Dad gets home." I didn't answer, another act of incredible stupidity on my part. Why I did not have sense enough to say, I'll take it now, I don't know. Well, Dad got home from the fields about dark. He took me to the garage. I remember the beginning of this. I remember when it was over, and I was back in the house, but I don't remember the in-between. My backside was so sore I couldn't sit down. I remember lying on my stomach on the couch in the parlor sobbing. Mother told me that I yelled so loud and long that Grandpa, who was a very gentle soul, went out to the garage and told Dad, "Don't you dare hit that child again." In this day and age this story sounds terrible. I guess it would be called child abuse. But between Dad and I, it was a joke in later years, or at least I thought it was. At some appropriate time or circumstance, I would say, "Reminds me of a kid that used to pull up onions." Then we would laugh. After Marj (that is what I call your mother) and I got married, she taught school in Lexington and there was a little girl in her class that she liked, Anna Belle. One weekend, when we were going to LaGrange to see my folks, Marj got permission to take Anna Belle with us. At the dinner table Marj began to tell everyone about the time she had to spank Anna Belle. Of course, the child was embarrassed to death and began to cry. So trying to think of something to say to help, I started to tell about a boy who got spanked for pulling up onions. I looked over and Dad was about to cry. Well, my Dad never cried. At that moment I realized that although I had forgiven him, Dad had never forgiven himself. I guess that is only half true. It never occurred to me that there was anything for me to forgive. I never mentioned the matter again.

One day I took a jug of water to Dad, who was working over near the river. As he was about to drink, I deliberately bumped the bottom of the jug; spilled water on him, and that cold wave of terror swept down my spine. Dad looked at me and in a very calm voice said, "You shouldn't do that you could knock a tooth out." I never forgot that moment, and I never again bumped a jug that someone was drinking from. There were plenty of other stupid things to do that he didn't tell me not to do.

When Roosevelt became president, he closed the banks; I can remember that. It must have been in the spring of 1933 because Roosevelt took office in March 1933. Mother and Dad went to Owensboro to try to get their money out of the bank. I wanted to go but was told that it was too dangerous. I would have to stay home. They didn't get their money. Mother was Worthy Matron, or whatever it was called, of the Eastern Star. They had $50 in the bank and that was lost too. So Mother suggested that the chapter make a quilt and charge people a dime to embroider their name on it. This was a great success. Just about everyone in Stanley paid a dime to get his or her name on the quilt. When it was over the chapter gave the quilt to Mother. The year she died, I gave it to the Owensboro Museum. That may have been the last thing she said to me. I told her what I planned to do and asked if it was all right. She said yes. Actually it was only a quilt cover; the quilting was never done.

Life in Henry County

Grandfather Zaring died in 1930 when I was about three. When Grandfather's estate was settled, Dad received a little money that he used to make a down payment on a farm in Henry County. He bought 75 acres at $30 an acre. That amounted to $2250 for the entire farm, plus a house with six rooms, a barn, a meat house, a garage, and a convenience that Dad called the Sheriff's Office. When someone went to the bathroom, they were reported to be down at the Sheriff's Office or they were visiting Mrs. Jones. As far as I know Dad made up both circumlocutions, I never heard anyone else use these expressions. Another circumlocution was used on the farm when someone stepped in a cow pile. You would say sarcastically to the poor victim, "Oh. You cut your foot."

In the farm community, March was moving time. March 1934, we moved to our small farm near Eminence. I remember the day well. We were up before dawn. I remember seeing the lights of the two trucks coming down the Laketown Road to move us. We loaded the trucks and Mom, Dad, and I climbed in the old Model A for the long drive. The distance was only about 120 miles, but it took about 5 hours to drive it. For me, it was a lonely place that we moved to. I didn't like my new home until about a year or so later when we went back to Stanley for a visit. I looked forward to this visit, but when we got to Stanley nothing was as I expected it to be. At a very early age, I learned that you can never go home. After that I was happy to get back to our little farm, located about three miles from Eminence in Henry County on the Smithfield Road.

I soon made friends with the two neighbor McCarthy boys, Stanley and Herbert. We played all the usual childhood games, hide-an-seek, tag, and on the fourth of July we shot firecrackers, which were legal in those day. On hot summer days we swam in the creek and nearby pond. Stanley and Herbert went to the Baptist Church. I was invited to join their baseball team, which I did. I did not play very well but we had fun. I continued to go to the Methodist Church in Eminience and joined that church when I was 12. About this time I met Tom Whealdon, whose father was our new minister. Tom and I spent a lot of time together. He would ride out to our farm on his bicycle and we would play Monopoly.

I didn't go to school until we moved to the farm near Eminence. I was seven, and in March 1934, I started school in the second grade. Even though I was there only about three months, I was promoted to the third grade. However, Mother didn't think I was ready and insisted that I remain in the second grade. I was so embarrassed. All my friends moved to the third grade but I didn't. So, I did the second grade and then the third grade. Everyone has a teacher that touches him in a special way and my special teacher was Miss Mary Swain. She taught the third grade. She had rules and she expected them to be obeyed. If you were bad she gave you a dose of castor oil. Well, I had had castor oil, ,so I preferred to be good, but she was also kind and encouraging. It was from her that I learned about Eyore. I greatly enjoyed Eyore, but I didn't remember what stories Eyore belonged to until I began to read to you two and discovered that he belonged to the Christopher Robin series. From this teacher, I also learned about Doctor Doolittle, which was probably my favorite.

When we moved to the farm in 1934, the only heat in the house was from a fireplace. One chimney served two fireplaces, one in the living room and the other in the bedroom. Fireplaces don't put out much heat; most of the heat goes up the chimney. In the winter, we lived mostly in one room, the bedroom. We had friends in Louisville, Lloyd Hester, his wife, and his daughter. Lloyd loved to hunt. He came to the farm every fall to hunt rabbits. In return, they invited us to their home for Christmas. I remember Christmas Day 1935. We drove to Shelbyville and headed up Highway 60 toward Louisville. It started to snow and when we got to Middletown it was a blizzard. We stopped briefly but decided to go on. Coming home we could see that there was lots of snow, but Highway 60, being east-west, was clear. Somewhere before we got to Shelbyville, Dad decided to take a short cut. We headed down a narrow north-south road and hit a snowdrift in which the front end of the car buried itself. It was already dark and it was cold. Dad went to a farmhouse near by to get help pulling the car out of the drift. Mother and I were invited inside to get warm, while the men got the car out of the drift. When we were ready to go, we headed back to Highway 60, drove into Shelbyville, and spent the night with Grandmother. The next day we headed home. When we got home, Dad built a big roaring fire in the fireplace and turned on the radio. Nothing happened. So Dad began to check out the radio, which was powered by a 6-volt car battery. He took the battery out and sat it on the floor. He looked and looked but couldn't find anything wrong. Then he looked at the battery on the floor. What happened was that while we were gone the temperature had dropped so low, well blow zero, that the battery froze and cracked. Sitting there on the floor beside a good fire, it thawed out and battery acid ran out on the carpet. It ate a hole in the carpet about a yard in diameter. But no problem. They just rotated the carpet so that the hole was under the bed. The next winter we had a heating stove that kept things toasty.

We raised pheasants in a large pen in the back yard. When we got home from our Louisville Christmas visit the year of the big blizzard, the snow was over a foot deep in the pheasant's pen and not a pheasant was to be seem. I was sure they were all frozen and grabbed a shove to dig them out of the snow, but with the first dig two pheasants flew up. They were alive down under the snow, completely covered. Sometime later we turned them all loose. Occasionally we would see one on the back of the farm.

I remember lots of things, but I am not sure when they happened so I will just have to guess. It must have been the winter of 1935-36 when the temperature dropped below zero and Mother went to the kitchen to fix supper. The kitchen was not heated. We cooked on a coal oil stove. She lit the stove and reached into a corner cupboard for a jar of spareribs. She dropped the jar, a quart glass Mason jar, and it landed on the handle of a cast iron skillet that was on the floor. That handle snapped right off of the skillet, but the jar wasn't even cracked. I should have saved that old skillet handle. We did save the skillet and used it for years without a handle.

One cold winter day, probably in the winter of 1935-36, the two McCarthy boys and I were out sledding. The best hill was their driveway. The driveway was steep and cut through a bank so you could not see the highway until you were almost on it, but we were careful. We took turns watching for cars. All the time we were out there, no cars came. Then one time we went without looking. My sled was easy to steer, so I could go down the driveway and turn down the road for a good long ride. Stanley's sled wouldn't turn the corner so we switched. I went first with Stanley right behind me. Sure enough Stanley was right. I couldn't turn the corner and shot straight across the road in front of a car that I saw as I passed. It was a close call. When I hit the ditch, I looked back and saw a sled spinning around underneath the car, a Model A as I recall. Stanley was hit and his leg was broken. We were both very lucky. When I got home from that adventure and took off my gloves the tips of two fingers were white. I had holes in my gloves and the exposed fingertips were frozen. They didn't hurt until they began to thaw out. I remember another time when Dad was out in the cold and his ears froze. He was outside trying to get the car started. When he got in the car I could see they were white and frozen but he didn't know. He rubbed one of them, it bent and stayed bent until he warmed up in the car and the ear thawed out.

For years I have felt that someone more religious than I should have lived my life. I did so many stupid things that could have turned out tragically but didn't. One that still impresses me was the time when I was about nine. We had a big rain and the creek behind the barn flooded and overflowed. There was an area near the creek that was low and flat. The water was out of its banks and over a large area. Dad was milking. I asked if I could wear his boots and go wading. He said OK, "But be sure that you don't get water in those boots." I put the boots on and started wading around. The water was flowing rapidly. The water was muddy, so you could not tell where the creek bed was. I was wading along slowly and fortunately taking small steps, when I stepped off the bank of the creek. My right foot went down to the knee and I got water in the boot. But, for reasons that defy explanation I did not topple into the creek. Instead, I just squatted down with all of my weight on my left foot perfectly balanced. There was no place to put a hand down for balance, so there I was balanced on one foot with my seat in the water. I had to lift all of my weight, plus a wet boot, with my left leg, while carefully maintaining my balance. Needless to say, I was happy when I got myself upright and my right foot on the creek bank. I could not swim, so if I had fallen in, I would have drowned because the water was deep and flowing swiftly. The thing that really scared me was that I had gotten water in one of Dad's boots. As soon as I got "ashore" I put the boots back where I got them, hoping they would dry before Dad discovered they were wet. I never told anyone about my close call. In fact, I didn't know that I had a close call until much later when I understood the possible dire consequences.

I never knew if Dad discovered the wet boot or not. He had a habit of not mentioning some kinds of things. For example, I was using the ax one day in the barn, while Dad was milking. He could see what I was doing and said "Move that jar before you break it." A quart jar was sitting on a low shelf near where I was chopping. I said, "No, its OK I won't hit it". The very next swing, the ax struck the log a glancing blow and headed straight for the jar. I felt like an idiot. Dad never mentioned it again. Neither did I. I was always a slow learner.

Entertainment was limited on the farm. Every Saturday night, during warm weather we would drive to town, sit in the car, and watch people walk by. I was happy when I became old enough that I didn't have to do that. Visiting neighbors, evenings or on Sunday, and talking was sometimes interesting. I loved going to the movies, any movie. And there was radio. In my opinion radio was better than TV because the scenery you created in your mind was beyond what any set designer could produce.

Our first radio was a crystal set. My cousin Raymond made it for us. We had one headset, but you could take the two earpieces off and use them separately. Dad would listen with one earpiece and I would listen with the other. I guess Mother didn't get to listen. Within a year, we had a battery-powered radio. It had three batteries, A, B, and C. The A battery was a regular 6-volt car battery.

The great thing about radio was the programming. There was something for everyone. During the day, there were soap operas, so called because they were sponsored by soap companies. Western movies were called horse operas. Soap operas were adult stories, so I didn't like them, but there were children's stories, like Little Orphan Annie, Jack Armstrong the All American Boy, and The Man From Mars. On TV, much of what goes on is conversation between people, but on radio a lot of time was spent describing something for the listener to imagine. Consequently there were things you could do on radio that you cannot do on TV. For example, I remember that in the Man from Mars there was a scientist who was trying to develop a universal solvent, and he succeeded. Naturally, since it was a universal solvent, it dissolved the container he made it in. It then began to dissolve the floor and the walls began to fall in. It began to dissolve the ground, mix with underground water, and soon the countryside was dissolving. As this scene was described you could see it all happening in your mind's eye. How did it end? I don't know I missed that episode.

One of the most famous radio events was the War of the Worlds, directed by Orson Wells. Based on H.G. Wells, _War of the Worlds,_ it was an account of an invasion of the earth by men from Mars. The main part of the account was a "news man" reporting from the front and describing what he was seeing. There were many people who tuned in late and didn't know it was a drama. All across the country, people who thought the account was true collected to defend themselves from these invaders. We weren't listening that night, so I missed one of the great events of radio. The next day at school my friends told me about the radio program and the people they knew who thought it was real. When I was in the Marines, cheap paperback books were made for service men. I got a copy of H.G. Wells' book. I read it, enjoyed it, and wish I had saved it.

Nighttime radio had great programs, comedy shows such as Burns and Allen, Jack Benny, variety shows such as the Kate Smith Hour. As I recall, Abbott and Costello first appeared as regulars on the Kate Smith Hour. I heard Who's On First when it was first done. One of these shows had Don Amechi, Charlie McCarthy, W.C. Fields, and others.

There were also great movies, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Lost Horizons, The Sherlock Holmes series, and the Three Stooges. There were also interesting actors, Martha Rae, Joe E. Brown, Ned Sparks, Eddie Bracken, Wallace Berry, Errol Flynn, and Walter Brennon.

Movies cost 25¢ for adults, plus 2¢ tax, and 10¢ for children. Mother, Dad, and I could go to the movie for 64¢. I used to get the money that was made selling eggs; the local grocer paid 12¢ a dozen. I saved my money. One time, when I finally had 64¢, I took us to the movie. I was so pleased with myself. We always went to Shelbyville to the movie. That was about a 15 mile drive. We dressed to go to the movie. Dad put on his suit, white shirt and tie, Mother put on her best dress, and I wore my suit too. After the movie, Dad would give me a quarter and I would go to the local hamburger joint and get 6 hamburgers with the quarter, two for each of us.

There was a little restaurant in Eminence called The Chat and Nibble. Occasionally we would have a meal at there. They served a plate lunch, for a quarter, that had a meat and two vegetables. That quarter included a cup of coffee. I always got a hamburger and a bottle of pop. They were five cents each. The three of us would eat for 60¢. Haircuts were also a quarter and that included tonic, if you wanted it. Tonic was a perfumed liquid that they would soak your head with before they combed it.

We were poor but I didn't know it. I never went hungry. We had three meals a day and a roof over our head. I remember the first time I realized that we were poor. One Saturday, Dad and I went to Eminence to see a movie. When we got to town he gave me a dime and told me he didn't want to go. I knew that wasn't true. But I took the dime.

Dad loved to farm. He worked hard but gained little. I remember one year in the 1930s he sold his tobacco crop for $365. He thought that was a great year. He had made a dollar a day for every day in the year. A dollar a day was the going rate for farm work. Before we left Daviess County, Dad bought a team of western mares. The horses were yearlings when Dad got them, so he had to break them to harness. They were pretty horses, sorrels with a flaxy mane and tail. One of the two trucks that moved us hauled the horses from the Miles home to out little farm near Eminence. Dad spent hours polishing harness and fixing it up with brass buttons. He was very proud of that team. These horses were always a bit fractious. Of course, on the farm, it was not uncommon for a team to become frightened of something and run off. A runaway team is completely out of control. All you can do is try to stay out of their way and avoid getting hurt. My cousin Raymond would spend some time each summer with us. He pitched in with the work. One day, Raymond was disking a field on the back of the farm. A disc is a large piece of equipment with a seat on it for the driver. Something scared the team, and they ran off. Raymond was thrown off in the process. Fortunately he went off the back. Had he gone off the front the disc would have run over him and quite possibly killed him. I was very small at this time, but I remember that there was a man we called Handsome who worked for Dad for room and board. Handsome and I were just coming around the barn. As Handsome was closing the gate we had just walked through, he saw the runaways heading toward the barn. He hooked the gate and had me get beside the barn around the corner from the direction the horses were coming. The team hit the gate, demolished it, and fell on the boards of the gate. By this time, they had run about a mile as hard as they could go. When they hit the gate they were worn out and didn't even try to get up for a while. Fortunately they were not hurt. This is not a particularly interesting story, but I put it in so that the next story would make sense.

Several years later, after we were living in LaGrange and I was in college, Dad was talking to our neighbor. In the conversation, he mentioned that he had to take his lawnmower to get it fixed. The neighbor asked what happened to the mower. Dad said, "I was mowing the other day. It was a bit windy. A piece of paper blew up and scared me. I ran off, hit a stump, and broke the mower." Only a farmer would understand that joke. Even then, it would have to be a farmer who had worked horses.

When Dad began to work his new farm, he discovered that some parts of it had not been in cultivation and bushes were beginning to grow. His team could not pull a plow through the rooted soil. Our neighbor was a highway contractor. He had a 60 horsepower caterpillar tractor. We thought that was a powerful piece of equipment. It is a fraction of the size of tractors commonly used on farms today in Illinois. Our neighbor brought his tractor over and plowed the field that Dad couldn't plow with a team. After the land was once plowed there was no problem in later years.

Farmers were pretty independent people in those days. They produced most of their own food. We had a large garden with everything you can imagine, potatoes, green beans, peas, lettuce, and radishes. I don't remember corn in the garden. We used field corn. I never heard of sweet corn until years later. Because the field corn was not sweet, we usually fried it or mother made corn pudding. We also had a grape arbor, an asparagus bed, and an apple tree. Potatoes were dug and stored for the winter and green beans were canned.

To raise potatoes, you don't plant potato seeds, you plant potatoes. In fact you don't plant a complete potato. You cut a potato into sections, being careful that each part has an eye. Plant such potato sections and they will sprout. After a good rain, Dad would say, "This rain will ruin all those small potatoes. It will make big potatoes of them."

In season, we had blackberries, and in the winter, we had blackberry jam. Mother made a great blackberry cobbler. It was best when warm and served in a bowl with rich cream poured over it. Blackberries grew wild on the farm. One day Mother was picking blackberries in a fencerow by the pasture that Dad was mowing. As he came around the pasture he looked toward Mother, who was standing under a small tree, and there over her head was a snake. Dad yelled, "Run! Don't look up!" So naturally she looked up and was eyeball to eyeball with a snake.

Dad was deathly afraid of snakes. I am sure that fear was passed on to me. I grew up with the idea that when you saw a snake you got a stick and killed it. That is wrong, because most snakes are harmless but useful creatures. They eat rodents and I know not what else. There were only two kinds of snakes on our farm that I remember, black snakes and spreading vipers, both harmless. I am told that the spreading viper is also called a hognose snake. There was quite a bit of wild life on the farm, rabbits, squirrels, ground hogs, pheasants, and one fox den. The pheasants were ones that we raised and released.

In the summer we frequently had a special meal of rabbit, squirrel, or fish. Once we had turtle and once frog legs. Everything was rolled in flour and fried in lard. No wonder it all tasted like chicken.

We butchered our own meat. Always hogs. I was never permitted to watch them shoot the hog. As soon as a hog was shot, his throat was cut so that the blood drained out. A large tank of boiling water was ready. The hog was dipped in the scalding water and then laid out on a large work board to be scraped. Scraping removed the hair. Without scalding it is very hard to remove this hair, but after the scalding it comes off easily. I don't know why. You also scald chickens to make the feathers easy to pluck. The hog is then hung up by it hind legs on an overhead rail built just for that purpose. The carcass is then gutted and cut up. Nothing went to waste. The brains were removed. We had them for breakfast, scrambled with eggs. The hams and shoulders are carefully carved out and put aside to be salt cured. The tenderloin was my favorite, but we didn't get to eat much of that because Dad put most of it in the sausage. The tenderloin is what you get when you order pork chops or a pork loin. The bacon is cut from the underside of the hog and put aside to be salt cured. Bacon has a lot of fat in it and there are layers that have more fat than meat. These layers are used to make lard. They are cut into cubes of about an inch or so on a side and dumped into a large cast iron kettle for cooking over a fire. As this cooks the fat melts into a clear grease. This has to cook for hours. An experienced cook can tell when it is done by tasting one of the little chunks called cracklings. When they are done, cracklings are great to eat. The grease is poured into large earthenware bowls, and left to cool. Some grease remains in the cracklings. There is a special press to squeeze the grease from the cracklings. When it cools this clear liquid becomes a white solid called lard. On the farm most meat and many other things were fried in lard.

Farmers have a special language to talk about the things they do. You don't butcher hogs you kill hogs, you don't make lard you render lard, and you don't make sausage you grind it.

Mother would take the hog heads to the house and boil them. From the meat that she got she made souse; some people call it head cheese. Mother also liked the tongue. I didn't care for either one.

Sausage was made by grinding up all of the good meat scrapes that were left. Dad loved sausage, and had a special recipe for seasoning it. He put most of the tenderloin into the sausage. For me, that was a waste of good meat. Sausage could be stored in a crock jars or in specially prepared cloth bags. I liked fresh sausage but before long it became strong. I didn't care for it. Dad loved it until it was all gone.

Dad had a special procedure for curing the hams. They were put in a tub and covered with salt. They remained in the salt for a specified number of days and the number of days depended on the temperature. When they were taken out of the salt they were hung in the meat house to be smoked. A small fire of hickory wood was built in a tub. This smoldered and smoked for a certain number of days. The meat then needed to age a while before it was ready to eat. For breakfast, Dad liked fried ham and eggs. Fried ham is hard as a rock and it is like eating a lump of salt. I didn't care for that. From fried ham, you get redeye gravy. If you boil a ham until the bone is loose most of the salt dissolves into the water and what is left is a soft and tasty piece of meat. Anyone who grew up on this kind of ham will never be satisfied with the city ham that you get in a store.

I had two basic jobs on the farm. One was to care for the garden. I hated that, so I did not do it very well. It was also my job to catch and kill chickens. I loved fried chicken, so I went about this job with relish. There are two techniques for killing chickens. You can ring their necks, that is, you grab the chicken by the head and twirl the body around in a circle until the neck breaks and the head finally come off. Another technique is to put the chicken's neck under a tobacco stick stand on the stick and pull on the chicken's legs until the head comes off. Of course you can also put the chicken's head on a chop block and whack it with a hatchet or ax. We didn't have a chopping block so I never used that technique. I remember one time when we still lived at Stanley, my cousin Jack and I decided to kill a chicken. No one told us to. We got a poor little thing that was two small to eat. One of us held its head on the chopping block and one of us held the ax. I think I had the ax. Jack and I must have been pretty small because that ax was pretty heavy. I raised it and let it drop on the chicken's neck, but for some reason the chicken survived. I looked at the chicken, had second thoughts, and suggested to Jack that we let him go because he was too beautiful.

This all sounds so cruel and heartless and indeed it was, but much worse goes on in a slaughterhouse daily as people prepare meat for our tables. When you buy your meat in a store you do not see what happened to the animals that you eat. On the farm, we were our own butcher. I don't think I would like to ring a chicken's neck today or butcher a hog, and I don't think that I could eat eggs and brains scrambled together, but when you grow up in a world where this is the norm it seems quite natural.

On the farm we raised corn, tobacco, and wheat. About 20 or 25 acres of corn, just enough to feed the stock through the winter, 2 or 3 acres of tobacco, to produce a little cash, and maybe 10 or 15 acres of wheat, to provide for the flour that will be needed for the year. Again there are special terms for planting these crops. You plant corn, set tobacco, and sow wheat.

I am pleased with the anti-smoking movement that is going on now. It may be that we will soon have smoking banned from all public places. That would be good. When I was a boy, I worked the tobacco fields and thought nothing of it. Tobacco is a complex crop to raise. It is interesting in spite of the objectionable product. Raising tobacco is an almost year round project. The year starts about March with a seedbed that we called a plant bed. Tobacco seeds are very small, so they have to be sown carefully in order to get the seed spread evenly. You mix the seed with wood ashes. That distributes the seed in such a way that they can be sown without putting all the seeds in one spot. The plant bed is prepared by plowing and working the soil. Plant beds are about 6 feet wide by 20 or so feet long, depending on how many tobacco plants you need. Weeds are a problem. To reduce their growth, plant beds were usually burned to kill weed seeds. You burn a plant bed by piling wood or corncobs on it and getting a good roaring fire going. After it cools you take your bucket of ashes and seeds and broadcast the seed by hand. Canvas is then spread over the bed to protect it from late frosts and from weed seeds being blown into it. If there is not enough rain, you haul water, and water the plants. Weeding a plant bed is one of the most boring jobs in the world. In spite of all your efforts to avoid weeds, you will still have weeds. They usually come up about the same time the tobacco plants do. As soon as they are big enough to pull, you spend hours pulling weeds, while trying not to pull the tobacco plants. Today tobacco plants are grown hydroponically and farmers buy them.

When tobacco plants get big enough to transplant and the ground is ready, it is time to plant tobacco. A tobacco plant needs lots of water, so we usually planted after a rain while the ground was still wet. We began by pulling tobacco plants from the plant bed. They are pulled and put carefully into baskets with the roots all pointing the same direction. Rows were marked off in the field. Someone then dropped plants, that is, they walked down the row and dropped a plant every 20 inches or however far apart you wanted then set. Next the plants were set. Setting tobacco is hard on the back. You use a tool called a tobacco peg. The technical word for it is "a dibble". A tobacco peg is a piece of wood about two inches in diameter and about 6 or 8 inches long. One end is blunt and is centered in the palm of your hand; the other end tapers to a point. You poke the pointed end in the ground to make a nice hole into which the roots of a tobacco plant are inserted. You then use the peg to push the dirt around the plant tightly so that the plant stands up. A good worker can set plants almost as fast as the dropper drops them.

Raymond made two tobacco pegs using cedar wood. One had a pistol grip. The other was a more traditional peg, but Raymond carefully shaped it so that it fit comfortably into your palm. He not only shaped the peg to the palm but he also carved indentations where your fingertips fit. Raymond's pegs were works of art. I wish I had kept them.

If you have a dry spell at tobacco planting time, you have to use a tobacco setter which, in my day, was a two-wheeled horse-drawn machine. This machine had a big water barrel mounted on it with the barrel lying on its side and a seat on the topside of the barrel for the driver to sit on. This seat is on a hinge and covers the opening where the barrel is filled with water. On the back are two seats, side by side, that are only a few inches off of the ground. You have to sit with your feet straight out and pointed toward the front of the setter. The two people work together. One person works with his right hand and the other with his left. Between them is a lever that raises and lowers a mechanism whose name I have forgotten, but which prepares a place for each tobacco plant to be planted. When this mechanism is lowered into place there is a leading edge that parts the ground as the setter moves forward. There are two shoes that pull the ground back together as you move forward. This is designed so that as the setter moves forward there is a little hole in the ground right in the middle of the mechanism. Because the machine is moving the two people have to work rapidly. You hold a plant in the "moving" hole being careful not to touch the ground with it until a valve opens and water pores into the little hole where you are holding the plant. At that time you push the roots of the plant into the wet soil and hold it in place as the two shoes pull the dirt around it. While you are holding your plant in place the person working with you puts a plant in the moving hole and waits for the next spurt of water. There is a loud click, as the water valve slams shut. The clicking of that valve sets the pace at which you must work in order to keep up. Horses also have to walk at a slow steady pace and lots of teams cannot be worked to a tobacco setter. I remember one time when we were helping our neighbor set tobacco. Our neighbor said that he did not have a team that could work a setter, and he asked if our team could. Our team had never been hooked to a setter, but Dad said sure they could pull a setter. The first trip across the field, they went so fast that the men on back could not keep up. Dad was pulling and sawing on the lines trying to slow them down. After about two trips across the field they settled down to a slow steady pace. They would walk at just the right pace so long as the water valve mechanism was clicking, but as soon as you got to the end of the row, raised the shoe, and the water valve stopped clicking, they wanted to go. Then when you made the turn, put the shoe down, and the mechanism began to click, they settled down to a slow steady pace again. I call this thing a shoe. I think that it had another name but I have forgotten what it was. Modern setters work differently. They have a wheel on the back. You place a tobacco plant on top of the wheel. This wheel rotates, takes the plant down to the ground, and plants it. How lazy can you get?

After the tobacco takes root, the next thing is cultivating. While the plants are small you can go in with a plow, loosen the soil, and plow up weeds. For the space between the plants in a row you use a hoe. As the plants grow, they finally get so large that you can't plow or hoe, but by that time the plants shade the ground so that weeds are not a problem. The next problem is tobacco worms. They are the large green hornworms that sometimes eat tomato plants. Tobacco worms can eat up a lot of tobacco, so the next job is worming tobacco. You walk down a row of plants and check each leaf for worms. They are usually easy to spot because they eat a hole through the leaf. You grab the worm, crush its head between your thumb and finger, and drop it on the ground. I remember that at the end of a day my hands were swollen. I never knew why, but I would guess that it might have been that my skin was absorbing nicotine from the tobacco juice that the worms had ingested. Dave once asked me if I ever got sick from working tobacco because of the nicotine. I never did and I never heard of anyone who did, but my cousins tell me that today, tobacco is raised by Mexican labor and they are very frequently ill.

The next fun chore was topping tobacco. A tobacco plant will continue to grow until finally it flowers and develops seeds. A few of the best plants were permitted to go to seed and the seed was saved for next year. All other plants were topped. When hybrid varieties came along in the 1930s, people bought tobacco seed. Hybrids produce seeds that revert to the stock that was crossed and so these seeds will not produce hybrid plants. The top part of a growing tobacco plant is tender and you can easily snap it off. Topping makes a plant spread and grow larger leaves. It also makes the plant put out suckers. Suckers grow just where each leaf is attached to the stalk. As suckers grow they absorb a lot of food energy. You don't want that, so the next job is to sucker tobacco. You walk up to a plant and feel the spot when the leaf is attached to the stalk. There you will find a soft tender sucker. It will easily snap off with a little thumb pressure. At least they will snap easily unless you let then grow too big, then they get so hard and tough that you have to cut them out with a knife. One of the fun things about suckering tobacco is that you get tobacco gum all over your hands. Tobacco gum is a sticky black substance that is hard to wash off. One time I was helping our neighbor sucker tobacco after the suckers had gotten so tough they had to be cut with a knife. When you help neighbors, it is understood that they provide lunch, except on the farm it was called dinner; the evening meal was supper. (Except it wasn't called the evening meal. Evening meant afternoon. I had to relearn that when I moved to the city.) When dinnertime came the neighbor got out some nice fried chicken. Fried chicken is always eaten with the fingers. No one washed their hands and they did not offer me a chance to wash mine. Tobacco gum does not enhance the flavor of fried chicken.

After tobacco has been topped, it turns yellow and soon it is ready to cut. A tobacco plant has a central stalk that is about two inches in diameter at the bottom of the plant. This stalk is composed of a tough outer skin that is about a quarter of an inch thick and a very soft pith. You cut tobacco with a tobacco knife. A tobacco knife has a blade, a stem and a handle all designed to split the tobacco stalk. You place the cutting edge in the center of the top of the plant, where it had been topped, and push down. The stalk will then split down the middle into two parts. You split the stalk to a point a few inches above the ground, then you remove the knife, and chop the stalk off near the ground. This split plant is then hung on a tobacco stick. Tobacco sticks are about four feet long and have their ends sharpened so that they can be easily stuck into the ground. Having the stick stuck in the ground makes it easier to spread the split plant and put it on the stick. A tobacco stick will hold maybe six tobacco plants, more if the plants are small. These sticks of tobacco are then taken to the barn and hung up to dry. While I was a boy a new method of cutting tobacco was developed called "spearing". A tobacco spear is a metal device about six inches long that has a very sharp point on one end and is designed so that the other end will slip over the end of a tobacco stick. You push the tobacco stick into the ground and put the spear on top of the stick. You don't have to split the stalk as before. You just chop the plant off near the ground, hold the plant with two hands, and press it down on the spear point. You want to press the spear point into the center of the stalk. The spear will go right through the stalk and split it a few inches on each side of the spear. You then push the stalk down on the tobacco stick. This is a lot faster that splitting.

Tobacco is cut in the late summer, August or September. It hangs in the barn until it dries and turns brown. The next thing is stripping tobacco. As the tobacco dries it becomes brittle and cannot be handled without damage. The dry tobacco crumbles into small pieces if handled. With a rain it absorbs moisture, becomes soft and pliable, and can be handled without damage. When this happens the tobacco is said to be in case. When the tobacco is in case, it is taken down from the barn carefully and tightly pressed into a pile in a convenient spot on the ground. This helps the tobacco hold its moisture and remain in case. This pile of tobacco is called a tobacco bulk. The next step is to strip tobacco. This consists of pulling the leaves off the stalk. Stripping requires three or four people. The leaves at the bottom of the plant are the best quality, and the ones at the top of the plant are the worst. Stripping begins with an armload of plants being brought into the stripping room and placed on a long bench were the strippers work. The first man pulls off the leaves near the bottom of the plant and passes the stalk on to the next man, who pulls the next few leaves off and passes it on to the next man, until it reaches the last man who pulls off the last few leaves and throws the stalk away. The leaves are graded by quality. Each man pulls off the leaves of a certain grade. Each grade has a name, but I have forgotten most of them. The bottom leaves are always damaged and a bit ragged. This grade is called trash. The next grade was called bright, I think. One grade was called long red. The last grade, which was the only grade I was permitted to strip, was the tips. Each man on the stripping line pulls leaves until he has a reasonable sized hand full. You then take one leaf from the rest and use it to wrap and hold the other leaves together. This is called tying, even though there is no knot in the process. A tied collection of leaves is called a hand of tobacco. The hand is then hung on a tobacco stick to either be hung up in the barn or to be put into a bulk. When the tobacco is stripped it is time to take it to market. Again it must be in case in order to be handled. At the market the tobacco is piled on baskets. Baskets are about four feet square and about six inches deep, but you can pile tobacco three or four feet high on a basket. Only one grade is put on a given basket. A government inspector checks each basket and sets a minimum price per pound, the support price for that basket. This is a judgment call based on the inspector's judgment of the quality of the tobacco. Then comes sales-day when the buyers from the various tobacco companies come to buy tobacco. The buyers walk down a row of baskets and bid on the contents. An auctioneer manages the bidding and decides when a sale is made. If no one bids the support price, or higher, that basket is bought by the tobacco co-op at the support price. Otherwise it goes to the highest bidder. As I recall, tobacco is sold in November, December, and sometimes in January. You collect your money, go home, and start all over again.

Let's compare tobacco with corn. With corn you prepare the land for planting in the spring by plowing and working the soil. Dad always planted corn on the 10th of May, if possible. Here in Illinois most corn in up by May 10. Corn was planted with a corn planter. Ours was a two-wheel two-horse piece of equipment that planted two rows of corn as you crossed the field. The planter dropped about three grains of corn in a hill, with hills about two feet apart. If all three grains came up, you cut two of them down because the soil could not support so many plants. This was called thinning corn. We didn't use fertilizer, we just rotated crops. One year, corn and tobacco was grown in one field and the next year they were grown in another. This gives the soil time to regenerate.

Corn has to be cultivated. A cultivator is a two-wheel, two-horse drawn machine with a seat for the driver. It has six or eight small shovel plows and is designed so that you can drive it across the field and straddle a row of corn. The entire cultivating mechanism can be raised and lowered by a lever. As you cultivate you pass over the row of corn with your feet in stirrups that enable you to push the plows to one side or the other to be sure you didn't plow up the corn. I had a little trouble on a hillside, where I could not keep the plow out of the corn. When the corn grows to about two feet you cannot use the cultivator any more but you can "bust middles" with a one horse cultivator that goes between the rows. Eventually cultivating stops and you say that the corn is "laid by." That means that it is just left to grow and mature. In the fall, and usually after frost, it is time to cut corn. Corn was cut with a corn knife. A corn knife is about two feet long, with a blade about three inches wide and a comfortable handle. A corn knife is used to chop. To cut corn you pick four corn stalks, two in each of two rows. You pull those stalks together and tie the tops with binder twine. Then with your corn knife, you chop corn stalks off near the ground until you get an armload. You take those stalks to your four tied stalks and lean then against the four. You repeat the process until you have a good size shock of corn. You then move on to a new location and repeat the process until all of the corn is cut and shocked. The corn continues to dry until it is time to shuck corn. To shuck corn you take an armload of corn stalks out of a shock and put them down on the ground. You grab an ear of corn, strip off the shucks, snap the ear off, and toss it in a pile. Later you come with a wagon to pick up the corn and haul it to the corncrib. The remaining corn stalks are called fodder and can be fed to the livestock.

Things are done a lot differently now, especially here in Illinois. No one farms with horses. Equipment is drawn by powerful tractors. Corn planters may plant 24 rows at a time. No one cultivates; they just spray weed killers. Things we did by hand are now automated. When the crop is ready for harvest a self-propelled combine drives through the field. This machine pulls the ears of corn off the stalk, shucks them, and shells them.

I am sure that all of this talk about corn and tobacco is pretty dull, but that is the point. For me life on the farm was so dull that I could not wait to get off. I would be riding the cultivator and daydreaming as I bounced across the field and sometimes plowed up corn. You could do most farm jobs, like plowing, and mentally be miles away. I was always as far away as I could get. I am sure that was why I found school interesting. I wasn't a very good student but neither was anyone else so I wound up at the top of the class by default.

By the time I was ready for fourth grade, Mother got a job teaching school at Smithfield, at $64 per month. I went to the Smithfield school for fourth through eighth grades. Although I was promoted from seventh to high school, Mother didn't think that was a very good idea, so I stayed and did the eighth grade. There were no inspiring teachers in this school, and life on the farm was very dull.

At Smithfield I had a few old friends, like the McCarthy boys, and I met new ones. William Lee Crabbe, was a farm boy. We became friends. We visited back and forth. I would spend a night at his house, and he would spend a night at my house. Our families would also visit and talk. Frequently, listening to adults talk was an evening's entertainment. William Lee's grandmother loved to tell about her experiences. I remember her telling about the hoop snake. The hoop snake is a legendary snake that would stick its tail in its mouth and roll around like a hoop. Needless to say they were very dangerous. Mrs. Crabbe said that she was out in her buggy and just about dusk she saw this hoop snake at the top of the hill coming at her. "I knowed what it was as soon as I seen it. I pulled the buggy offen the road as fur as I could get, but I couldn't get the hine wheels off." The hoop snake hit a hind wheel. I have sort of forgotten the rest of the story. I think that hoop snakes strike tail first and break into piece when they hit, but that may be an old wives' tail. Of course I didn't know better at the time. I thought that if adults said they saw something then they surely saw it. Mother and Dad, of course, knew better but not me. Mother called her stories whacks: "She is just tells a big whack."

Dad had a great hoop snake story. This man wanted to build a house and was out in the woods marking trees to cut for lumber. He heard something. He turned around and there was a hoop snake coming straight at him. He ducked and the snake struck a sapling. When the poison entered that tree it began to swell. It swelled up so big that the man cut enough lumber out of that one tree to build his entire house. He got the house built, moved in, and began to paint. Well, the turpentine in the paint began to reduce the swelling and the house began to shrink. It shrank so fast they barely got the furniture out, and it shrank up so small that he finally nailed it on a post for a birdhouse.

Racial relations in Kentucky were strange. The separation was social rather than physical. Schools were segregated, but our closest neighbor was a black family that lived across the road from us. I remember admiring the short kinky hair of the little boy that lived there, and thought how great it must be not to have to comb your hair. This family didn't have a well so they carried water from our well. The father's name was Shelby. He would milk for us on occasion, when Dad was away and I was too small for the job. While he was milking, Shelby would tell me ghost stories that scared the pants off of me. Of course, I believed anything an adult said.

Shelby's wife was deathly afraid of storms. When a storm came up she would run to our house and mother would sit and talk with her until the storm was over and she calmed down. I remember once when a big storm came, she ran to our house, up on the porch, and in the front door. Mother sat and talked with her in the living room. When she left mother laughed and laughed because this lady had come in the front door. For mother it was a breach of etiquette, like wearing your hat in the house.

The second farm from ours toward Eminence was owned by a black couple. They were elderly and so I addressed them as aunt and uncle. I have forgotten their names. One day Dad and I went to their place to borrow something. We went to the back of the house and Dad called. When I asked why we went to the back door, Dad said when they come to our place we expect them to come to the back door. I thought this very strange but there was a peculiar reciprocity about it. At that time it seemed to make sense. At least it made as much sense as many other customs.

I remember the night the school in Smithfield burned, but I don't remember the year. It was Halloween and we had a Halloween party. These parties were to keep kids busy so they wouldn't be out doing pranks. Kids were pretty destructive at Halloween in those days. These parties were also money raisers. There was a "fish pond" that consisted of a sheet hung in the corner of the room, so you couldn't see behind it. For a penny or two you got to "fish". You took your pole, dropped the line over the top of the sheet, and someone tied a prize to it. There was also apple-bobbing and other games. When we returned to school the next day it was just hot ashes. I thought it was great the school was gone but in a matter of a few days, school resumed in a garage loft and other empty space that was found in Smithfield.

Dad had a drinking problem of long standing, but I did not know about it until we moved to the farm near Eminence, where it was hard to hide. There were periods as long as six months when he would be sober only long enough to go to town to get a bottle. Once when he was drunk, he and I got into a pillow fight. We both had a great time and it is the only time I ever remember just "cutting up" with my father. Mother was very upset and I think understandably so. I knew that when Dad was sober we never did such things. The drinking ran in cycles. There were some good times.

Sometime around 1940, Dad's drinking got very bad and life was very unpleasant. There are some stories that I could tell here, but there is no point in doing so. For example, I once became so angry that I hit my father. He was drunk at the time. It is still a very painful thing to recall. Things got very bad, so Mother decided that we would move out. We rented a room in a home in Eminence. I thought that was heaven. We had electric lights, indoor plumbing, and central heat. About this time I discovered a great book about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. It was great fun lying in bed and reading this book by electric lights. I never wanted to go back to the farm, but we did.

After 1940, things changed for the better. Dad had gotten so bad he began to have hallucinations. He saw little green men. I saw him see them. He decided he had to change his life and so ours changed too. He decided that he would not drink any more and he never did. I admire him for that. Few people could have done this without help. In the summer of 1941, Mother had to go back to Western Kentucky University to take courses to renew her teaching certificate. Dad and I stayed on the farm. Dad took a job mowing the highway right-of-way to make extra money. I fell out of a swing and broke my collarbone.

One day when Dad was mowing the right-of-way, I went to play with the McCarthy boys. We usually played baseball but this day we decided to make a swing. All we had was clothes line cord. It was pretty old. I was about fourteen, I guess, and should have known better than to make a swing with clothes line cord, but I didn't. We made the swing and we each had a turn using it. Then Stanley and I got in the swing together. We were standing up, pumping as hard as we could, to go as high as we could, when the rope broke. We were at the highest point when it broke. Well, there was no place to go but down, and I was on the bottom. I broke my collarbone. It really hurt, but I said I was all right and I started home. Stanley could tell I was hurt. He walked home with me. After a while, I asked Stanley to get his dad to take me to the doctor. I had to wear a brace for a while.

Dad and I became very close in the summer of 1941. Every Tuesday and Saturday night we went to the movies. We worked and we talked. Dad applied for and got a job at the Kentucky State Reformatory. Because he worked the late shift I had to take over most of the farm chores. I caught the school bus at 7:30, but before I did that I had to milk two or three cows, separate the cream, and slop the hogs. The cream separator was a centrifugal one that you hand cranked. The cream came out one spout and the skimmed milk came out the other. We called this fat-free skimmed milk "blue-john". After its use, the separator had to be taken apart and washed. Slopping the hogs meant pouring the blue-john into a trough for the hogs to drink.

Animals sense it if you are afraid of them. There was one heifer (young cow) that knew I was afraid of her. If I walked within four feet of her she would kick at me. I couldn't milk her without putting kickers on her. She never tried to kick Dad. It was a good thing for her that she didn't. Had she tried he would have beaten the tar out of her.

It was always a pleasure to get on that school bus and away from the chores on the farm. In the fall of 1941, I went to high school in New Castle, which was a pretty long bus ride away. First we went to Smithfield to drop kids off at the elementary school, about three miles, then on to New Castle, about 10 miles. My first year in high school, I went out for basketball. Dad had played basketball on an out door court. He told me that they once won a game by the score of 2 to 0. In his day, guards were not permitted to cross the centerline; they only played defense. Dad's team strategy was to score and then play defense. It worked. Can you imagine watching 40 minutes of a game in which only one basket was scored?

By my time the game had changed. We played in a gym and guards could go anywhere. Dad came to see me play my first game. I had only been out for practice about two weeks. I couldn't dribble or shoot. I was awful. Dad was so disappointed that he never came back to see another game.

There were other jobs on the farm that had to be done, but I don't remember doing all of them. I remember cutting the corn so that must have been in the fall of 1941. I remember doing the plowing so that must have been in the spring of 1942. I walked the furrow barefooted worrying about plowing up a snake. Of course, no one every plowed up a snake because snakes don't burrow into the ground, but I didn't know that. All I knew were the stories of people plowing up snakes. Plowing was hard work. At the end of a furrow, you had to get the plow out of the ground and ready for the turn. You also had to lower the handle of the plow to the ground to raise the singletrees, so the horses wouldn't step out of the traces when they turned. You had to make a sharp ninety-degree turn, so the horses did a kind of side step. As soon as they completed the turn, they would be off, so you had to get the plow handles up and the plow point into the ground as you started the new furrow. There was a lot of lifting and tugging and dragging to do. It is a shame that you two never had a chance to experience any of this, but, of course, I never got to detassel corn or muck and paint.

We Left the Farm

We moved to LaGrange in the fall of 1942. I don't remember the corn being planted that year, but I remember riding the cultivator after the corn was up. I don't think we set tobacco that year. We rented the first floor of Mrs. Garr's home for $16 a month. It was Mrs. Garr's sons who shot General Denhardt on the streets of Shelbyille. That is too long a story to tell here, but if you are interested google "General Denhardt".

Mrs. Garr lived upstairs, and we lived downstairs. The house had electric lights, indoor plumbing, and central heating. I thought that was a great life. The day we left the farm was the happiest day of my life. There are some pleasant things that I remember about the farm. There was a papaw tree on the back of the farm. I loved papaws. There was a fox den back there and a spring where the water bubbled up out of the ground. I sometimes stopped to get a cool drink. You had to lie on the ground, put your face in the water, and hope there were no snakes near by. I was not too fond of snakes. I way have mentioned that.

My first job in LaGrange was digging potatoes for Mr. Pollard, our neighbor. I was paid 20¢ an hour. I worked for ten hours, got $2.00, and my conscience bothered me because I knew that no one was worth $2.00 a day. On the farm, people worked for $1.00 a day and that would be a sunup-to-sundown day, 12 hours or more. My next job was mowing lawns. That didn't pay very well. I got a job in the local laundry. The owner liked me. He began to train me to run the place, but I didn't like laundry work. A high school friend of mine, "Moon" Adams, was the projectionist at the local theatre. He had an assistant. When the assistant's job became available, Moon asked if I would like it. I took it, at $3.50 a week. A year or two later, I moved up to projectionist and made $7.00 a week.

The movies ran six nights a week, two shows each night, plus a matinee on Saturday. I thought it was an incredible job. They paid me to watch movies. I watched every movie every time it ran. In those days movies were almost always double features, i.e., two movies, plus a cartoon, a newsreel, and a short comedy. I loved it. There were no movies on Tuesdays, so on that day, in the summer, Moon, Tom Whealdon, other friends, and I would go to Louisville. We went to the arcade, which was the forerunner of the video game store, and to the fruit bar, where you could buy any kind of juice, including many that I had never heard of. We would walk through the lobby of the Brown Hotel, so we could go around in the revolving door and we would go into the shoe store and stick our feet in the x-ray machine to see our toe bones wiggle. Those machines are now illegal. The main thing we went to Louisville for was to go to a movie. One time we saw three double features in one day.

To get around town we would catch the city bus. We would all get on and each of us would sit in a separate seat. We hoped that some pretty girl would get on, find no empty seat, and sit by one of us. They never did. They would always sit by some old man. A few years ago I was doing genealogy in Louisville, I got on the bus and took the only empty seat. At the first stop a pretty young girl got on walked over and sat down by me. I almost yelled, "No! No! Don't sit here."

Once Moon took me to a farm where there was a cave that he liked to explore. The cave had a rather large entrance. You walked into a room ornamented with bats. At the back was a narrow passageway. To get to it, you had to crawl under a big bolder that hung from the ceiling, then climb over a ledge. Once in this passageway, you could stand up but it was narrow, so narrow at places that you had to turn sideways to get through. I was a bit claustrophobic, but I went. I was always greatly relieved when we got out. A few years later, I was back out to that old cave and the big bolder we had crawled under had dropped down front the ceiling. When Dave was caving, I thought about that old cave and that bolder that could easily have crushed us had it fallen when we were under it.

Work at the Reformatory was Dad's salvation. Indeed it became his life. It was called a reformatory but it was a minimum-security prison. Every day, Dad would have some new story to tell about the prison. His first job was guard-tower duty. He worked the late night shift from midnight to morning. Guard towers ringed the prison just outside the fence. A guard was posted and remained in the tower until relieved when the shift changed. The guard's job was to watch for escaping prisoners. At night that was a bit eerie. Dad had lots of prison escape stories. One was of a group of prisoners who managed to get on the roof of a building that was close enough to the fence that they could jump from the roof and clear the fence. As each prisoner jumped, a gun sounded and the prisoner fell dead on the ground just outside the fence. Even with the first two men lying on the ground, a third man leaped and was shot in midair. I have wondered if that really happened. One attempt was made from a building whose roof was not flat and which was so far from the fence that no one thought it possible to escape from there. Two men got to the top of the pitched roof, one on each side of the pitch. They held hands at arms length, ran as fast as they could, and jumped. They cleared the fence but broke their legs when they landed.

As he gained experience Dad was given different jobs. Since it was minimum security most prisoners were kept in dormitories, but there was a cellblock where the bad guys were housed. Even in the cellblock, the prisoners were not locked in their cells all of the time. Once when Dad was working the cellblock, a group of prisoner jumped him and beat him almost to death. A bar of soap in a sock was used as a blackjack. Dad was saved because he played dead and one prisoner told them to stop beating him. They planned to go out into the exercise area, a walled off area that was actually outside the fence. They planned to climb the wall and make their escape, but they were spotted by tower guards. As soon as they realized they couldn't escape, they all went back to their cells. Soon armed guards came and rescued Dad. He was taken to the prison hospital and cared for. He looked awful with stitches in his face and head and two black eyes. Dad knew the prisoner who stopped the beating, but he didn't know all of the people involved in the attempted break, so they took this prisoner into a room near the cellblock and Dad asked him who was involved in the break. He was reluctant to talk for fear of the prisoners he would have to live with, but Dad made a deal with him. The prisoner gave names and the guards pretended to beat him by banging on the table while the prisoner yelled and screamed. The inmates thought the guards beat the information out of him.

Bad things were done to prisoners. Inside the fence, guards could not carry guns. Instead they had heavy canes with which to defend themselves. David has Dad's cane. These canes were not always used for defense. They were sometimes used to frighten and intimidate prisoners. One warden gave a standing order: "If a prisoner gets out of line, don't send him to the hole; send him to the hospital." The hole was a place of solitary confinement. I don't know how many prisoners were "sent to the hospital" but those canes were the main tool for that purpose.

The medical services in the hospital left something to be desired. I remember Dad taking me through the hospital and seeing a prisoner whose hand had turned black. He was a drug addict and had injected himself with some bad stuff. He put it in an artery in his arm. The injected artery carried blood to the capillaries in his hand. There the bad drug blocked the circulation so that all of the tissue fed by these capillaries died. Another time when I was home on leave, Dad took one of my Marine buddies and me through the hospital. We saw a man with a bad sore on his foot. As we walked away my buddy, who had been a medical student before he entered service, said, "That is gangrene. He will be dead tomorrow." He was.

At one time Dad was Athletic Director for the prison. It was his job to purchase equipment and supervise athletic events like boxing and baseball. The public could go and watch these events. At another time in his career, Dad supervised construction. He would take a crew of prisoners out to some place on the prison farm to do some job. Of course, he picked his crew carefully because the object of the game was to bring back as many prisoners as you took out. He frequently picked murderers. Dad said you can't trust a thief. One day, they were tarring the roof on a building somewhere out on the prison farm. The tar was heated so it could be spread easily. The flame went out on the kerosene heater. They refilled the tank, Dad turned the kerosene on, bent down, lit a match, and reached in to light the burner. I guess he didn't understand how volatile hot kerosene can be. The mixture exploded and his hand was badly burned. He was in great pain, left his prisoners, and went immediately to the prison hospital for treatment. All of the prisoners came back.

One day, Dad had a work crew out somewhere. A prisoner saw a rabbit and said: "Sarg shoot that rabbit and we will have him for lunch." Dad drew his pistol, took careful aim, and pulled the trigger. Instead of a bang, all you heard was a little fizzle. He cocked the pistol again, aimed, and pulled the trigger. Again a little fizzle. When he got back to the prison, he checked his gun and discovered two bullets lodged in the barrel. Oil from his gun had seeped into each bullet and dampened the powder so that it wouldn't fire properly. He was lucky that the second round was also defective. Had it fired with the first bullet jammed in the barrel, the gun would have blown up in his face.

Dad was interested in all of the prisoners he knew. When they got out, he would go visit them to see how they were getting along. It was possible for a prisoner to get a leave of absence for a family emergency, like a death in the family, but they had to be accompanied by a guard. A prisoner asked Dad to be his guard as he attended the funeral of someone close. Dad agreed. This prisoner's home was way up in the Kentucky hills. Dad said they drove and drove up a little winding country road, came to a creek bed, drove up the creek bed a long way, parked the car, and walked up a path. At last they came out into a valley where you could see cabins all around on the mountainsides. When they got to the home, all of the relatives were collected. Every man was armed; there were rifles, shotguns, and pistols. Dad said he turned to the prisoner and said, "Are you going home with me tomorrow?" He said, "Yes." Dad went in and went to bed. He knew that if the prisoner decided not to return, there was nothing he could do, so he decided not to worry about it. The next day they set out for the Reformatory.

The guards at the prison had military ranks. Dad's highest rank was Lieutenant. At one time he was the Warden's right-hand man. He regretted that he did not graduate from high school. Had he done so, he might have become warden. At the top, positions were political. Dad was a Democrat, but he was not very political. He just liked his work. One year, a Republican governor was elected and a Republican warden was appointed, but Dad kept his job. At the next election, a Democrat was elected governor and a new warden was appointed. Dad was fired because he had not resigned, as a good Democrat was supposed to do when the Republican administration came in, but before too long he got his job back.

Mother taught school almost all of her life. When she started, about 1918, it was possible to get a life certificate with little more that a high school education. She didn't apply because she didn't expect to teach for life and when she decided to be a career teacher the law had changed; college training was required. Mother spent years going back to college to pick up enough hours to renew her certificate. She graduated from college one year before I did. I graduated in 1950, from Kentucky Wesleyan College, and she graduated in 1949, from Western Kentucky.

After we moved to LaGrange, mother got a job teaching at Buckner and then one in LaGrange. My old friend Tom Whealdon was now in LaGrange also. His father had been appointed minister of the LaGrange Church. When the war started, Rev. Whealdon enlisted as an Army Chaplain. The Whealdon family remained in LaGrange until the war was over.

While we lived in LaGrange, the Supreme Court struck down segregation, and the schools were required to integrate. I was pleased at how things were handled in LaGrange. A mob collected on the courthouse lawn to protest integration. The sheriff told them that he was sworn to uphold the law, integration was now the law, and so he was going to enforce it. Everyone went home and that was the end of it. There was a little black girl in mother's class that was the target of taunts by the white kids. She came into the classroom crying. Mother picked her up, set her on her lap, and hugged her. She could not have set a better example or sent a better signal for those kids.

I turned 18 in November of 1944, so I was subject to the draft. In anticipation of that, I took three courses in summer school so that I could graduate from high school before I was drafted. One was a course in psychology, I have forgotten what the second one was, but the third was a course in business arithmetic. Brother Moody, the Methodist minister, taught me the first two courses. I was to take a proficiency exam on business arithmetic at the end of the summer. When I went for my exam, Moody wasn't there. When I asked where he was, I was told that he left on vacation the day before. I didn't know what to do because I was to go to Kentucky Wesleyan College the next week. You have to have a high school diploma to be admitted. Not knowing what to do, I just went to old KWC and they let me in without a question. My friend Tommy Whealdon also went to Wesleyan. We roomed together in Batson Hall. I think that there were 12 of us in the dorm. The entire college enrollment was only about 80. One day, I mentioned to Tom that Moody didn't give me my exam. Tom said, "Oh, he left that exam with me and I forgot to give it to you." When I graduated from Wesleyan, I got a copy of my transcript. On it was listed my high school subjects and grades. There was business arithmetic with a grade of 98. I have always wondered what I missed on that exam.

Uncle Sam Wanted Me

On our eighteenth birthday Tom and I registered for the draft and decided not to apply for deferment. We went to Louisville for our physicals. I passed mine and Tom flunked his. Tom had a chest deformity. There was an indentation in the middle of his chest that you could stick your fist into, so he was 4-F, physically disabled. That was a crushing blow to him. It is difficult for people who did not live at that time to understand the strong public support that existed for World War II. To be 4-F was a tragedy. Tom tried to volunteer for everything. No branch of service would accept him. He dropped out of school and just bummed around for about two years. In the mean time, I went into service. At my physical exam there was a long line of men getting examined at the Armory in Louisville, all standing around in their skivvies. At one point we came to a table where an Army Colonel and a Navy Commander asked, "What branch of the service do you want?" All of my cousins were in the Navy, so I said "Navy". The Colonel looked at the Commander and said, "You can have him." So I got dressed and was sent to a room that must have had about 50 future sailors in it. In a moment, a Marine Sergeant walked in, looked over the stack of papers on the desk, pulled out five files, and said, "The following five people are Marines." I was one of them. So off I went to Parris Island for boot camp as Serial Number 994493.

There was a little town about ten miles from Parris Island called Yemassee. The saying was that Yemassee was the rectum (they used a different word here) of the south and Parris Island was ten miles up it. This gives you an idea of how Parris Island endeared itself to us all. A lot of picturesque GI language came out of World War II and into the public domain. The finger is an example. Most people don't know that originally there were sound effects that went with it. You held up the finger and said "Boing" except you made that reverberate "Boioioing" like a spring bouncing back and forth. I was home on leave one time and went to a movie in Louisville. I don't remember the name of the movie but it starred Van Johnson as a GI. In one scene Van was in a crap game and won all of the money. I guess they couldn't use the finger in the movie so Van Johnson took his money, folded it lengthwise, stuck it up in the air and said "Boioing." Every GI in the theatre almost fell out of his seat laughing. No one else knew what it meant. There is also the saying about getting the short end of the stick. The problem with the stick was not that the end was short but that it had fecal matter on it. But enough of culture.

Oh, there were some military things that got their names from the public domain. Who knows how the Jeep got its name? I do. About the time the Army came out with this very versatile vehicle that could go anywhere, the newspaper comic strip Popeye introduced a peculiar little creature called the Jeep. In fact, he was Eugene the Jeep. The strange thing about the Jeep was that he could go anywhere. You couldn't lock him up because he could just pass right through the wall and go on his way.

There was also the antitank weapon called a bazooka. It got its name from a musical instrument that an Arkansas comedian Bob Burns invented. It was a long pipe-like thing that you held up like a trombone to play. There was a mouthpiece and, at the end, a funnel. It was a joke. At each performance Bob would play something on his bazooka. I am sure the antitank weapon was named a bazooka because it resembled Bob Burn's musical instrument.

Nothing much happened in boot camp except for my clever way of avoiding KP, kitchen police. My platoon was to go to the rifle range and do KP when they returned. About my first day on the range I developed German measles and was sent to sick bay; you civilians call it a hospital. When I was released I had to join another platoon. The one that I joined had just completed KP and was on its way to the rifle range. So I missed KP. It was a shame.

One day while I was on the rifle range, orders came down for me to report back to camp on the double. I took off, on the double, back to camp, where no one knew what I was to do, except to wait. Soon a Jeep arrived, I got in, and was driven to the base hospital where I was ushered into a doctor's office, and told that some officer's wife was pregnant. I wasn't going to let them pin that one me, but they explained that she had been exposed to German measles, which threatened the life of the baby, if she contracted measles. They wanted some of my blood to use to immunize her. I heaved a sign of relief and told them to help themselves. After they drew the blood, the doctor invited me home with him for dinner. Having been on the rifle range for most of the day, I was pretty dirty and tried to beg off, but he insisted. He had a beautiful home, a wife, a small son, and a maid who served dinner. When we sat down, they asked if there was anything I would like and I said I would love to have a glass of milk. It turned out the only milk in the house had just been poured for their young son. They insisted that I have it. I felt like an idiot sitting there drinking this kid's milk.

I was a pretty good shot with the M1 rifle. To qualify you fired so many shots from 100 yards, offhand, i.e., standing, so many rounds from 300 yards, sitting and kneeling, and so many from 500 yards, prone. When you finished firing, the command was, "Pick up your brass and get off the line". So you picked up your spent shell cases and got off the firing line. The day before we qualified, I fired expert, but the day of qualification there was a tricky little cross wind and my score dropped to marksman. Like I always say, a poor excuse is better than no excuse at all. A year or so later, at Camp Pendleton, I had to re-qualify. I had an excellent score until I went to 500 yards. There I blew it and came in again as a marksman.

Things were pretty primitive in certain parts of Parris Island. At one place the latrine had running water but not the standard commodes. Instead there was a trough about 20 or 30 feet long covered by a board with holes cut every few feet along its length. At one end of the trough, water flowed in, and at the other end it flowed out, into a sewer line. There might be a half-dozen guys using the facility at the same time. One day, a wise guy rolled up a big wad of toilet paper, struck a match to it, and dropped it where the water flowed in. As it drifted by, guys would leap to their feet as they got the hot seat. I laugh today listening to GIs complaining about their lack of privacy.

Back then a war was on. Training was tough. Drill instructors (DI) could be brutal. I saw boots who were required to do the manual of arms with their locker box. I remember a report of a DI who marched his company into the ocean and drowned a few of them. I was lucky. My drill instructor was tough but considerate. I just wanted to complete boot camp and move on. Things are much different today. Now there is even a graduation ceremony for those who complete boot camp.

While I was in boot camp, President Roosevelt died and the nation mourned. He was the first and only President to be elected four times. After boot camp, I was sent to Camp LeJeune, NC, for infantry training. I have forgotten the time frame but sometime, either while I was in boot camp or Camp LeJeune, the war in Europe ended. The country celebrated VE-Day, Victory in Europe Day.

Infantry training was not a lot of fun. To make matters worse, I did not take it very seriously. One time we made a long hike, supposedly imitating battle conditions. At night we had to pitch our tents and post guards. There were two of us in a tent. My buddy and I were hardly in our tent when "we were attacked" and expected to roll out and fight the enemy. My buddy did, but I was very comfortable where I was, so I stayed in my blanket roll. There were lots of shots. The raiding party cut several tent lines; mine didn't get cut. Our officers knew what was planned, so they set their tents up on the hillside. One kid ran up to the Colonel's tent and yelled, "Colonel! Colonel! We're out of ammunition!" All we had were blanks. During our stay there, we learned how dangerous blanks are. A blank is a full load of powder without a bullet. One kid, thinking they were harmless, put his rifle on his foot and pulled the trigger. It blew a hole through his foot. We were given orders that there would be no lights after dark. One officer crawled into his tent one night and discovered there was a snake in with him. The next day orders were changed to permit lights in your tent.

Back at base, we were given an explosives demonstration. There was a hill that sloped down to a lake. The sergeant who was giving the demonstration had his table set up by the lake. We were up on the hillside in a kind of natural amphitheatre. The sergeant explained that you can throw something faster than you can run. So, if an explosive lands near you don't run, pick it up, and throw it. He took a small box of plastic explosive, stuck a fuse in it, lit the fuse, and tossed it in the lake. There was a big explosion and a spout of water. Then he made another one and tossed it up on the hill where we were all seated. Some people ran. I was sure they would not use real explosives for this demonstration, so I just sat there. One Marine, near where the bomb landed, picked it up and threw it toward the lake, but it hit a tree limb and landed near an officer who was standing by the tree. The officer took off running as fast as he could. The sergeant slowly walked over, picked up the bomb, and threw it in the lake. In a few seconds it exploded. I rethought the matter.

Although the war in Europe was over, fighting in the Pacific continued. As best I can remember, it must have been early summer of 1945, I was shipped from North Carolina to California in a replacement draft. I have forgotten our draft number. We went by train. Just about everything on wheels was pressed into service during the war. The train car we were in was an open bunkroom with a potbelly stove for heat. Oh, so it must have been in the fall of 1945. You don't need a potbelly stove in the summer.

Replacement drafts are to replace casualties in fighting units. By the time I got to California, Congress had passed a law that 18-year-olds could not be sent overseas without 6 months of training. Too many of them, like me, didn't take the training seriously and when they got in battle, they got killed. They hadn't learned their survival lessons. I was pulled out of the replacement draft, which I was told later went to Okinawa. I never knew how people could know where that draft went. Okinawa was one of the worst battles of the war, with very high casualties. I was lucky, doubly lucky, in view of how little of my training I had learned. I was not a good Marine. Come to think of it, I was never very good at anything, but if you get a Ph.D. it doesn't matter.

Together with a large group of others, I was awaiting reassignment. One morning with nothing to do, we were lying around on our bunks. Suddenly people began to scurry around, pretending to be busy. I looked up and there was a big sergeant standing by my bunk. "What's your name fellow?" I told him. "Report for KP at the chow hall immediately." I had spoiled my perfect record of avoiding KP.

Late one evening as a buddy and I were getting off KP and returning to our barracks, we heard a siren. Here came a big limo with a motorcycle escort headed for the open-air theatre that was near the kitchen. We went over to see the show. It was Eddie Cantor with Marlyn Maxwell. My buddy ran a little faster than I and got a seat on the first row. He got to kiss Marlyn Maxwell. I didn't even get her autograph.

My next assignment was to stand guard duty. My recollection is that, like KP, you caught guard duty for a week, but you bunked in the guardhouse. I have forgotten the details, but I think we were on duty for 24 hours and off 24 hours. The day you were on duty you guarded a post for 4 hours and then you were off 4 hours. As we were being taken to our posts, the sergeant asked if everyone knew how to report a post. I didn't but not wanting to appear dumb, I said nothing. Low and behold, the duty officer came by my post. I challenged him, but I didn't do it right. I was sure there would be consequences but there weren't.

One evening about dark, I was handed a rifle, a Rising, and told to take a detail of about 4 prisoners to a nearby office building to mop the floors. These prisoners apparently knew what to do because when we got there they did the moping without any instructions from me. On the way back to the guardhouse I wondered what I would do if anyone tried to escape. I had fired this type of rifle before but not enough to be familiar with it. I knew it was a semi-automatic. That meant that once you got a round in the chamber all you had to do was keep pulling the trigger, and it would fire until you ran out of ammunition. It didn't have a bolt like the M-1. I couldn't remember how you got that first round in the chamber. I was confident that my prisoners did not know that, so I faked it. When I got back I didn't have sense enough to quit while I was ahead. I asked the sergeant how you got the first round in the chamber. He was not impressed.

After two or three weeks of this kind of duty, I was sent to motion picture projectionist school in San Diego, after which I was assigned to Camp Pendleton to run movies. This was pretty soft duty. We were in Special Services, so we did not have to meet formations or answer roll call, and we got extra pay. There were several movie theatres at Camp Pendleton. A different movie ran in each theatre, each night, seven days a week. That meant they had to have lots of movies and some of them were pretty bad.

About this time the war ended, America celebrated VJ-Day, Victory in Japan day, and the troops started coming home. Camp Pendleton did not have enough space for all of these returning Marines, so they opened tent camps somewhere back on the base. I was assigned to run the movies at one of these camps. I bunked in the projection room; got up when I felt like it. I didn't have sheets or blankets, but there were two matrices, so I slept between them. One morning as I was neatly tucked between my two matrices, I heard someone coming up the stairs. In walked a Colonel. "Don't you have blankets and sheets?"

"No Sir."

He looked around and noticed that I also didn't have any fire protection. Movie film in those days was nitrocellulose and highly flammable.

"Get a bucket of water in here."

"Yes, Sir."

But I didn't and I never saw him again.

My next assignment was Camp Mathews, where I was the projectionist for a troop-training unit. We were training Army soldiers in amphibious operations. I ran the training films. Since the Army people were there to be trained, they got all the stinky jobs, like KP. Most Marine mess halls have a food line. You pick up a tray, your food is spooned onto your tray, just like on MASH, and you then find a place to sit and eat. There was always the mess hall comedian who would walk in as you were on your way to a table and say "Is the coffee hot?" Then he would stick his finger in your coffee.

At Camp Mathews we had our meals at tables, family style. There were tables for 8 or 10 people and the food was in bowls. When a bowl was empty you gave it to whoever was on duty. He went to the kitchen, got it filled, and brought it back to the table. One of the Army boys serving our table was obviously not very bright. If you gave him a bowl, he would go to the kitchen and forget what he went for. Needless to say, this poor fellow was the butt of a lot of jokes. I remembered him a few days ago. I went to the study to get something. When I got there, I forgot what I went for. God gets you.

Camp Mathews was also the rifle range for the Marine boot camp in San Diego. They had an outdoor movie theatre. One evening I walked over to see the movie. It was a terrible movie. In one scene a woman shot a man. As she was standing over the body, a boot yelled, "All right lady pick up your brass and get of the line." That was the best part of the entire show.

The Camp Mathews operation had more chiefs than Indians. Wherever you looked, there was an officer. In addition to running the training films I was also in charge of the officers coffee kitchen, called the officer's mess. When I arrived the mess was a mess. I cleaned it up and put a tea towel under the unused cups instead of just stacking them on the bare counter. I even spread one over the cups to keep dust out. This must have caught someone's attention, because they recommended me for Annapolis Prep School, in Bainbridge MD, to prepare for study at the Naval Academy. After a few weeks at Bainbridge, I woke up one morning wanting the strangle the bugler, and realized I didn't want a military career, so I got out of the Marines and went back to KWC.

Back to School

While I did my two years in service, my friend Tom Whealdon, who was turned down as 4-F, dropped out of school. He did various jobs, including working for the railroad. When I returned from service, Tom decided that maybe life was worth living after all. We went back to Wesleyan together. Soon after arriving on campus, which I guess was the spring quarter of 1947, I met Marj. We were assigned to the same table in the dining hall. We dated for about three years and saw a lot of movies together. Dr. Howard, my math teacher, used to have an annual pie party for math majors and I would take Marj. Those were great pies.

I graduated at the end of the first semester of 1949-50 and went off to graduate school. Tom needed another year to graduate. He planned to go to graduate school to study English. The Korean war started. Tom was drafted, shipped to Korea, and sent to the front lines. His unit was overrun by the Chinese and had to fight its way out from behind enemy lines. All of their NCOs were killed and Tom was field promoted to Sergeant. He came home with the Silver Star, Purple Heart, Presidential Unit Citation, and a chest full of ribbons. I came home with an American Theater ribbon and a good conduct metal, which is about the least you can get for two years of service.

I had returned to Kentucky Wesleyan intending to major in chemistry. I knew no chemistry, because none was taught in my high school. I was not a very good student. The main thing that I had going for me was a good memory. Went I was young, I remembered everything. Now that I am old, I can't remember anything. Henry County had a countywide "fair" each year in New Castle. Students took exams, gave recitations, and competed in various things. One year, when I got home from the fair, Mother asked what I saw. I told her about a recitation that some boy gave. I told her the entire thing in such detail that the next year she entered me in the contest. I gave the same recitation and won.

At Wesleyan, I learned soon that I couldn't do chemistry. In the quantitative analysis lab, I would measure as carefully as I could. My experiments would be off 25%. Of course, I always enjoyed mathematics, but what could you do with that. Dr. Howard thought I had some talent. She got me a teaching assistantship in the math department at the University of Kentucky. I enrolled in January 1950, planning to study physics, even though I had only one course, general physics. That was all that Wesleyan offered.

Marj and I dated for about three years and then we made plans to marry. We married on August 25, 1950, in Kenosha, WI, and moved into an apartment on Bell Court in Lexington. The rent was only $75 a month, but we couldn't afford that. As a graduate assistant, I made about $900 a year, so all of my money went into rent. Marj taught school and made $2300 a year. About a year later, we moved to a cheaper apartment on Woodland Avenue, at $65 a month. We couldn't afford that either. Perhaps six months later, we moved into university student housing in Shaneetown, at $30 a month. We could afford that because it included electricity and coal oil for heating. We had a phone, which was our only extra.

Marj worked my way through graduate school, but teaching was very stressful for her. She would come home, go to bed, and teach all night. She talked in her sleep. "Stop that!" "Sit down and be quit!" The next day she would not even remember. One night she yelled, "There's a needle in bed!" She hopped out of bed, turned on the light, pulled down the covers, and was frantically searching for the needle. I was sleeping with my back to her. When she yelled, I froze. I could just see that needle sticking straight up in the bed with me about to roll over on it. She was yelling, "Don't move. Don't move." I didn't, but in a few seconds, it dawned on me that this made no sense; she was asleep. After a while, I got so used to this that when she would sit up in bed and start talking, I would reach over and take her by the shoulder, pull her back down in bed, and she would settle down.

Jim was courting Genny about this time. He came to Lexington every weekend and spent the night with us. He slept on the couch. We gave him a key, so that we could go to bed. One night as he was putting his key in the lock, Marj raised up and said, "Wilson someone is breaking into our house." I reached over and pulled her back down into bed. By that time Jim had the door open. Marj popped up and yelled, "Who's there?" Jim said, "Jim." Marj yelled, "Jim who?" Poor Jim must have wondered if he was in the right house.

It soon became clear that teaching was producing too much stress, so Marj got a job at the University, counseling students who were on academic probation. She loved that, and I don't think she has talked in her sleep since. Marj was very successful as a student counselor, in spite of the fact that she had no training in this area. One of the Ph.D. trained counselors believed in the nondirective approach. How anyone could believe in that I never understood. When a student came in, this nondirective counselor would sit and say nothing until the student started the conversation. Naturally, he had lots of silence in his sessions. On the other hand, Marj would immediately begin the conversation, "Good Morning. How are you today? How are the classes going?" At the end of the year, each counselor's success ratio was calculated. This was the ratio of the number of students you got off probation to the number of students you counseled. Marj had the highest ratio of success of any of the counselors. At the end of the year, the nondirective guy gave up on that approach.

At the University, I enrolled in all the physic courses I could and soon discovered that I couldn't do physics. All of my experiments were off by, guess what, 25%. There was nothing left to do but mathematics. I was somewhat more successful in this area than in chemistry or physics. My first year as a graduate student, I took a course in Number Theory, taught by Adolph Goodman. He expected each graduate student to present two topics to the class. I picked Euclid's Algorithm for finding the greatest common divisor of two integers. In preparing my presentation, I discovered a theorem that I reported to Goodman. I don't think he believed me, so he said go home and prove it. I tried very hard but was so new at the game that I really didn't know how to prove anything. I got close enough to a proof that Goodman was convinced. He helped me with the proof, added a theorem, and we published the result as a joint paper in the American Mathematical Monthly. In the fall of 1950 or 1951, in East Lancing, MI, I presented this theorem at a joint meeting of the Mathematical Association and Pi Mu Epsilon, a national math honor society,. There I saw the most appalling behavior I have ever seen from a math professor. Several other graduate students also presented papers at this meeting. One poor fellow, a student of a mathematician named Frame, got confused in the middle of his presentation. Frame jumped up, dashed to the blackboard, took the chalk from the student's hand, told him to sit down, and completed the talk. At the end of that rude display, I turned to Goodman and told him that if he did that to me I would punch him in the nose. He assured me that he was equally appalled at Frames' behavior and added that if I made a mistake he would pretend he didn't know me.

As a result of this paper, I was invited to join American Men of Science. Goodman was an outspoken fellow; he thought this was a bit premature. I am sure he was right. By graduation, I had discovered a generalization of the first result and that led to a joint paper with N.G. DeBruijn, a mathematician in Holland. These two papers got me my job at Illinois.

I graduated in May 1955, and since Marj's mother had just had a serious heart attack we spent the summer in New Castle, PA, so Marj could help care for her mother. In the fall, we loaded up and headed for my first, and only, real job here in Champaign. After we moved into our apartment in Urbana, Marj saw an ad in the paper for a teacher. She applied and was hired to teach Fourth Grade at Columbia Elementary.

About February of 1956, while supervising prisoners in the tag plant, where the automobile license plates were made for the state of Kentucky, Dad had his first heart attack. He was in pain, but didn't want any of the prisoners to know, so he did the worst thing he could do. He climbed a flight of stairs to a loft area, where he could be alone. After a rest he went home, collapsed there, and was rushed to the hospital. Marj and I drove all night to get there. Dad spent a few days in the hospital and then went home for a few weeks of bed rest. After we returned to Champaign, we learned that Marj was pregnant. Dad was pleased at the prospect of becoming a grandfather. The guards at the prison said he would stick his head in a rain barrel and yell "Grandpa" just to hear the sound. I don't remember exactly when he returned to work but in October 1956, Dad was supervising construction. He had his crew out on the farm somewhere loading supplies on a truck when he collapsed and died. The prisoners picked him up, loaded him on the back of the truck, and drove to the front gate, where they turned him over to the guard. He still had his gun, and in his billfold were 4 one hundred dollar bills. He loved hundred dollar bills. Who wouldn't? Dad's work crew sent a sympathy card. Each prisoner signed his name and wrote his number beside his name. I still have that card.

Because Marj was well along in her pregnancy, she did not go to the funeral with me. She stayed with Dr. Lippi and his family. Marj had a very difficult delivery; David was transverse. As I recall, we went to the hospital about 11:00 p.m. Marj was in labor all night. The next morning, I went to campus, taught my 8 o'clock and came back to the hospital. Marj was still in labor. I went back to campus, taught another course, and returned to the hospital. Marj was still in labor, but eventually Dave was born.

Marj never saw a baby that she didn't think was beautiful. All babies looked alike to me. When I was permitted to see Marj, she was in tears. "Isn't he ugly", she wailed. "No. I think he is a good looking kid." Because of the difficult labor, Dave's head looked like a washboard, and the doctor had nicked him with the forceps. But, he out grew it all. Mothers are funny. They forget all of the pain and go through it again. Sue's delivery was much easier and quicker so I don't remember any details about it, except that I did teach my classes.

After Dad died, we sold the farm at Eminence for $200 an acre, which we thought was a good price compared to the $30 an acre we paid in 1934. At $200 per acre the 75 acres brought $15,000. I was at the old farm several years ago; the man who bought it still owned it. He pointed to a house near the road in a field where we used to raise crops. "I sold that acre for $8,000." He had recovered more than half of his initial investment with the sale of one acre.

When the farm was sold, I told mother she should invest some money in mutual funds. She wrote me a check for $10,000. That was the biggest check I had ever seen. I began to quake in my boots. Now what do I do? This is a big part of her life savings. I put half of it in MIT and half in Wellington, which was not the best decision ever made. Soon after I bought it, the market took a big down turn (Nixon's Recession) and it was years before it came back, but it turned out OK in the long run. Mother received a dividend check every quarter. She loved that. She didn't know if it was a good return on her investment or not, and she didn't much care. She just loved to get dividends.

My first year at the U of I, I was on a nine-month contract and paid the princely sum of $4200. A year later it went up to $4500. We were pretty tight on money. I remember buying a second hand TV, for about $120. I financed it over 12 months. In 1957, I made $5600. With all that extra cash on hand, I signed us up for a 10 year, $50 per month investment in Wellington Fund. That was not the smartest decision I ever made. There was an 8% fee taken out the first year, that is, of the $6000 I was to invest, $480 went poof the first year. Over the long haul, this did turn out to be a reasonable investment. In July 2000, I sold all of our Wellington shares for $149,000 and made another unwise investment. I bought two technology funds just before the big technology bubble burst, later that year.

In 1957, Mother bought a house in Stanley, moved there, and taught in the Stanley school until at age 70, she had to retire. In 1968, she moved to Champaign, to be near us. She lived on Westfield Drive. When she was about my age and we would take a trip, you two would stay with her, and we would tell you what to do if anything happened to Grandmother. We worried that she would drop dead while we were gone. Somehow, today, I don't worry about people dropping dead. It must be a young person thing.

Integration was the big thing when we arrived in Champaign. The local schools were slow to act. When we first moved to town, theaters and restaurants were segregated. They quickly changed but not the schools. Marj and I joined a small organization called the Education Study Group. Their purpose was to put pressure on the school board to integrate. Marj didn't get to attend many meetings because we had you two to care for. Usually she stayed at home and I attended the meetings, but it was a joint effort on our part.

Our group supported two candidates for the school board. One candidate, David Session, was elected. He was the second black elected to the school board and he helped integrate the schools. I was the fundraiser for the campaign. I don't think that I did a very good job.

The police department resisted integrating and several of us, mostly from the University, picketed the old City Building, which at that time was the police department. That was quite an experience for someone, like me, who does not like to be on public display. We formed a rather unusual picket line. The men were in shirts, ties, and jackets; the ladies were in dresses, hose, and high heels. As we marched around the City Building, the police were watching us to see that we didn't block any doorways. Across the street, members of the John Birch Society were watching us, probably just to see who we were. I think that everyone should stand in a picket line sometime in his or her life.

When we first moved to Champaign, I thought we would buy a small house. I asked the realtor if he had any houses in the $10,000 range. He said, "Yes, but you wouldn't want to live in one." Ozier and Weller was just beginning to build National Homes in Champaign. We looked at them, but we didn't have enough income to qualify. My $4200 salary didn't cut it. A year later, Ozier and Weller had better financial arrangements. We were able to buy a house with only about $200 down. Our first house was on Parkdale Drive, where we lived next door to the Bulinskies. When Sue came along we needed more space, so we traded that Nation Home in on another one on Alton Drive. This was a great neighborhood for families. If you stuck your head out the door and yelled, "Dave and Sue," you might get two or three of each. Everyone looked out for everyone else. And, you could walk to school. You each had reading difficulties that we did not understand in time to help. It is my guess that you inherited that from me. I learn much better from what I see and hear than from what I read. When I was in graduate school, I could either listen or make notes, but I could not make notes and understand what was being said. So I just listened. Everyone else made notes. One day Prof. Goodman said that the staff was concerned because I never took notes, so I began to scribble during lectures and then everyone was happy.

The University of Illinois provided a great opportunity for me. I am thankful for that. It didn't take me long to realize that I was out of my league here. When I graduated from Kentucky Wesleyan, I knew little mathematics beyond calculus. I arrived at the University of Kentucky about a year behind other students. By the time I graduated, I had caught up. In fact, I had two papers in print and my doctoral thesis was accepted for publication. When I arrived at Illinois, I discovered that I was again far behind. All of my training was very classical. I knew nothing about modern mathematics. I had to dig in and catch up. My approach was to say, "Yes" whenever I was asked if I could do something.

There was a shortage of algebraists one summer. I as asked if I could teach Group Theory. I said, "Sure." I went to the bookstore and ordered every Group Theory book on the market. A text was recommended. When it arrived, I too one look and decided this was too dated. I put it aside and spent the summer designing a course as I went along. I did not teach, but gave the students theorems to prove, starting with very simple results that everyone could do. As the summer progressed, I gave them more difficult things. Class time was devoted entirely to students proving theorems. I think this was the best course I ever taught. I also had one of the brightest students I have ever taught, Mudamo. He was Indonesian. By the end of the summer, he was the only one who could prove the theorems, and I was scrambling to find results for him to work on. Mudamo pushed me to work on the fringe of my own knowledge. That was not good, but I survived and I think the class learned.

My first few years at Illinois, I worked very hard on research and discovered a result that I was never quite able to prove. I obviously have no talent for this kind of work, but I have also had some bad luck. My thesis director at the University of Kentucky was Adolph Goodman. He worked in Univalent Function Theory, which I found to be a very difficult area. There are no simple tests for Univalence and one day I discovered one. I took it to Goodman. Goodman was very good at constructing counter examples. A counter example is something that proves a conjecture false. He sat there and drew pictures for several minutes and said, "I can't think of a counter examples so it is probably true. Go proved it."

I was sitting in my office one day when a student, who was a year behind me, walked in with a question. He was studying Advanced Calculus using a text by Kaplan. In his text, Kaplan added a chapter on Complex Variables. In this chapter, Kaplan added a section on Univalence, and in this section, he had listed all of the known tests for Univalence. My friend wanted me to explain these tests. I started down the list. I came to a footnote, and looked to the bottom of the page. The footnote explained that while preparing this section the author had discovered a test that would be the subject of a soon to be published paper. There was my test. Since Kaplan had priority, I could not use the result in my thesis.

When I got to Illinois, I looked up Kaplan's paper. He is a real mathematician, so he had taken the test far beyond anything I could have thought of. He used the idea to define a class of functions that he called Close To Convex. There is a natural question to ask about such a class of functions. I won't bother to explain it, but it is called the Bieberbach Conjecture. I proved that Close To Convex Functions satisfy the Bieberbach Conjecture and mailed the proof to a journal for publication. The very next day my office mate, Franz Hohn, walked in, "Is this the theorem you were telling me about?" There, in print, was my theorem, so I wrote and recalled my paper.

In January 1958, Joe Landin asked me to join him as Associate Director of the Academic Year Institute, (AYI) a program for retraining experienced secondary school mathematics teachers. The National Science Foundation funded this program. My job was to develop a two-semester analysis course. The text material for this course was published in 1967 as An Introduction to Analysis, my first book. I thought it was a pretty good book, but no one else did. I found AYI work to be very interesting. These teachers were eager to learn and a pleasure to teach.

Set terminology was a major pedagogical tool in new math education programs, so when Gaisi Takeuti offered a course in Axiomatic Set Theory, in 1963, (I was not sure of the year) I sat in and took notes. Gaisi could not speak English very well, so he just wrote theorems on the board and gave the proofs. In one semester, he covered a course that was two semesters in Japan. For me to understand this subject, I had to add details that Gaisi left out. When Gaisi finished the course, I was still working on the first half. Consequently my notes were much more extensive than Gaisi's. William Boone was a mathematical superstar, who gained international fame by settling the question of the Word Problem for Groups. Bill became a good friend and supporter. One day Bill came by my office and saw what I was doing with my notes from Gaisi's class. Later, when Gaisi was on leave and there was no one to teach the Set Theory Course, Bill told the Department Head, "Zaring can teach it?" The Head asked me if I could and I said, "Yes." I knew the first half of the course. I figured I could teach the first half and while my students were learning that, I could learn the last half. This worked out well and it opened a new door for me. I got to teach both graduate and undergraduate courses in Logic and in Set Theory. My training was in analysis, but curiously, I never taught a graduate level course in Analysis. I have taught graduate level courses in four areas, Algebra, Geometry, Logic, and Set Theory, all subjects I had to learn on the job.

Bill Boone urged Gaisi to publish the Set Theory notes that I had prepared, but Gaisi was hesitant on the grounds that the notes contained nothing new. Eventually Bill convinced him and in 1970 Springer Verlag published my notes as _Introduction to Axiomatic Set Theory,_ coauthored with Gaisi. When the book was ready, the publisher asked for names of people who should get complimentary copies. Gaisi told me not to sent copies to any of the top Set Theorists. A few weeks later one of the top guys (I have forgotten his name) saw a copy of our book, met Gaisi, and told him, "This is a pretty sophisticated little book." The next day Gaisi called me, from the Princeton Institute, and said to send copies to all the Set Theorists. This book was well received and a second edition was published in 1981. I am rather proud of it.

In 1973, Springer published a second volume, _Axiomatic Set Theory,_ co-authored by Gaisi and me. Actually I had very little to do with this volume and urged Gaisi not to include my name but he insisted. In 1971, I was coauthor with Ken Henderson and Zalmin Usiskin of _Pre-Calculus Mathematics._ I am not very proud of this volume. The book did not do well.

In 1976, I completed a booklet that I am also very proud of. I totally rewrote the introductory volume, Book 1, _Introductory Logic_ of Elements of Mathematics (EM). The EM program was part of the Comprehensive School Mathematics Project headed by Burt Kaufman. Burt's philosophy was that able students should not be accelerated through the school curriculum. For social reasons they should stay with their age group. For such students, Burt thought their program should be enriched. When Book 1 was finished, I then had to integrate this new material into the next two volumes of the series, Book 2 _Logic and Sets_ and Book 3 _Introduction to Fields._

I think we all enjoyed the International Hospitality Program. Over the years, we served as host family for several international students of different national origins. I don't remember them all. For those I remember, I don't remember how to spell their names. There was Mrs. Sah from China. Her son lived here, so she remained in Champaign. Hideaka Kawaba was from Japan. He was back in Champaign a few years ago and came by to say hello. Sathemurthy(?) was from India. He was in Champaign a few years ago. We were surprised when he told us how important our family contact was for him. We had a student from the Soviet Union, one from Turkey, and a family from Nigeria. There were many others.

I was originally appointed as an Instructor in Mathematics. That was in 1955. In 1957, I was promoted to Assistant Professor and in 1963 to Associate Professor. In 1964, Joe Landin left to become Head of the Mathematics Department at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and I became Director of the AYI. 1973 was the last year for the AYI and I became Assistant to the Head of the Department of Mathematics. In 1978, Jim Armstrong, the department's Graduate Advisor, died unexpectedly and I took over his job. That same year I received the Max Beberman Award from the Illinois Council of Teachers of Mathematics. That was nice. In 1982, my job title was changed from Graduate Advisor to Director of Graduate Studies. That is a much more impressive title but the job remained the same, and so did the pay. My main job was the care and nurture of graduate students.

I think I have pretty well covered things, at least I have covered everything I can remember. You both have fine families now, so you know the joys of parenthood. You now have your collection of stories about your children that bring a laugh, like when we were eating at the Hong Kong and Sue was about 3. Our waitress was a bit oversized and when she walked by our table there was total silence except for the squeaking of the floor. Sue piped up in a voice you could hear all over the room, "Gee! What a fatso!" We wanted to crawl under the table, but she was right. When Dave was small and did something that I thought cleaver I would say, "That's using your noggin." One day Marj took Dave to see the Captain Eddie Show, a kiddy program on Channel 3, TV. Captain Eddie would have a group of kids on the show, and talk to one or more of them. Dave got on the show. As Captain Eddie walked by Dave noticed that the overhead mike was close to his head, so he said "Don't conk your noggin on that thing." That got his attention, so Captain Eddie interviewed Dave. There are also the things you remember with pride like Dave braving bitter cold weather as a Kenwood patrol boy and that night at Allerton Park in subzero weather. It makes me cold just thinking about it. And there was Sue's walk for charity. I think it was about 25 miles. She walked the whole thing with huge blisters on her feet and refused to quit until she completed it. With these events I knew that you both had the grit and determination to get through any of life's difficulty. My shortcoming in life is that I never said enough to let you know how proud I am of each of you and of your fine families. Maybe cruising is a way of saying that.

Here is a list of some of my literary works. My hope is that you will enjoy reading them.

A Husband's Lot:

Ever wonder what goes through a man's mind as he attempts to be Mr. Fixit? A Husband's Lot is a light-hearted look at a "honey do" project gone wrong. A short story, laced with humor, as a devoted husband tries to fulfill his wife's wishes and at the same time trying to save a buck. What a man won't do for the love of his life! ISBN: 9781301055821

American Falls:

This is an historical tale of a young man coming of age and his journey to find answers to the questions in his life. At the age of 16, Christian Miller left his home in Pennsylvania. His desire to travel West had to do more with his desire to leave behind his troubling memories than his desire to have an adventure. However, adventure was what he found. During his travels he found spiritual enlightenment, was disillusioned and found more truth than he expected to find. This adventure novella gives us a look at the early 1800's and the trials and hardships that came with the time. ISBN: 9781476083278

Paris in the Spring:

Anthony took her hand, raised it to his lips, and very gently placed a kiss.

Annette smiled, "How gallant."

"Yes," Anthony agreed. "One of my many virtues." Annette laughed, Anthony smiled, they parted.

Anthony was delighted with Annette. She was attractive and she was also very bright. That was important to him, consequently, he spent as much time with her as her work would permit. He introduced her to his friends, who invited her to dinners and parties so they could introduce her to their friends.

The day came for Annette to depart and Anthony drove her to Willard Airport. "I would like to stay in touch. May I call you?" he asked.

"You have made a rather dull vacation quite exciting. Yes, let's stay in touch. Are you ever in California?

"Sometimes. But I rarely know more than a day in advance."

"Let me give you my address."

"I already have it," interrupted Anthony.

"How did you get that?"

"I have a Map to the Stars," quipped Anthony.

Anthony's life just got complicated. He loves his job. Unfortunately, he can't share the details of that job with anyone. That hasn't ever really bothered Anthony, until he meets Annette. Annette is a famous film star, and as unlikely as it seemed—even to Anthony—they enjoy each other's company and begin a long distance relationship. As it turns out, Annette also has secrets to keep. When Anthony discovers Annette's secret past, life becomes even more complicated. Anthony fears for their relationship when he uncovers even more intrigue surrounding Annette. Will she be able to forgive Anthony for the secrets he has been obligated to keep? Find out in this novella when spy meets girl. ISBN: 9781301389711

The Firebird:

I need to go underground until I can sort this all out. Can you put me up some place? And, I will need a gun." Ben no longer felt a need for a gun, but he knew that Carlos loved theatrics and responded best when adrenaline was flowing.

"I have just the place for you. The house where you interrogated Tomas. It is a safe location where I have people who can keep an eye out for you."

"That sounds good. I also need to set up a diversion to take attention away from me in this area." Ben handed Carlos his driver's license, his social security card, his passport and his plane ticket for his return trip to Champaign. "Have someone use this ticket under my name. You will need to replace some pictures. They don't have to go all the way to Champaign. They can go to Atlanta and fly back from there. Get someone about my size and have him wear these." Ben handed Carlos his straw hat and sunglasses.

"Isn't that a bit paranoid, George?"

"Look! I'm alive. I plan to stay that way and complete my mission."

Ben, a career spy, comes out of retirement to help his country. He's a bit eccentric—even his cover identities have cover identities—but all his caution has kept him alive. Can Ben uncover a plot in Columbia before the death toll rises? A fast paced novella full of intrigue and espionage. ISBN: 9781301213573
