Chapter 3

A MAN CHILD IS BORN

(My parents, their marriage, the births of their 4 children, and my life up until I start the 1^st grade of elementary school at the beginning of September 1952.)

I praise and thank God that I was born of Christian parents. That is a tremendous blessing and a most valuable “correct start” of my eternal existence.

My mother, Mattie Ruth Cash, was born in the fall of 1913 in a rural area of Lamar County, Alabama. She was called by both of her names (Mattie Ruth). Mother died in March 1954, about 6 months past her 40^th birthday. That was soon after I turned 8 years old. My earliest childhood memories are from about the age of 4 years. Thus I “knew” Mother for only a short time, 4 years or so.

I remember my Mother as a most moral and upright, modest, poor and hard working farm wife and mother who sang hymns as she went about her daily toil and labour. Mother talked much. She worried much and she cried much. She appeared tired and weary much of the time. I thank God for a Christian Mother who daily toiled and laboured endlessly to provide for and to take care of her family under very limited and trying circumstances of quite extreme poverty.

My heart rejoices beyond measure knowing that since March 1954 Mother has been in the Perfect Bliss of Heaven basking in the Glorious Presence of her Loving Lord and Saviour. I rejoice in knowing that any second now, I will join her there. “Even so, come, Lord Jesus!” Reader Friend, please join me on this earthly journey to God’s Eternal Heaven.

My father, Pascal Newton Yerby, was born in mid-1917 in a rural area of Lamar County, Alabama, several miles from mother’s parent’s house. He was almost 9 months past his 85^th birthday when he died in early April 2003. Dad was one of the most upright people I have ever known. The following 4 characteristics of Dad stand out profoundly in my mind and each had a powerful influence on me for good.

1. He was a hard worker. I regularly watched him daily labour long hours at strenuous, tiring labour. He required all us children to work hard on the farm. But he was most fair about it in that he worked much harder and longer than he required us to do, setting a more than fair example for us. Mainly because of his example and him requiring his children to work hard, God made me into a somewhat diligent hard worker. (To God be the Glory!)

2. Daddy almost never ever complained. He spent decades in dire poverty. Most of his waking hours were spent in strenuous farm labour. He had little leisure time, especially until he was 65 years old or so. Many days, he became extremely fatigued from manual farm labour. But honestly, I don’t recall him ever complaining about those hardships, about his lot in life, or complaining about much of anything at all actually.

3. He was a man of few words and his words were upright.

4. He minded his own business, not meddling in the affairs of others. Thus he was not a nuisance to people, nor did he gossip about others.

Reading thru the Holy Bible, you find many Scriptures commanding the above 4 things of us, and teaching us many virtues of them. I thank God for giving me such a godly Father.

My parents were married on the 24^th of December 1938. I am most blessed that each of them had received Christ in their youth and thus had become Christians before they married. What a blessed heritage I have, having been born of Christian parents. They are now in Heaven. I look forward to soon joining them in God’s Glorious Heaven. I want you to join us there also. Whatever you do, don’t miss God’s Heaven!

More than 13 months after my parents married, their first child was born in early 1940. They named their baby girl, Janiece, pronounced Ja-niece’. But a good number of people call her, Ja’-nice, and write her name, Janice, because that is a more common name.

In mid-1944, their second child was born, a son. They named him Sidney. While mother was carrying Sidney in her womb, her younger brother, Vade, was in the U.S. Army fighting on deadly battlefields in Europe. Mother would daily spend much time kneeling on both knees, bowed forward, crying out to God to mercifully protect my Uncle Vade and bring him back home safely. God answered her (and others’) prayers by bringing Uncle Vade safely home. But long hours of Mother’s kneeling position cramped the baby in her womb resulting with Sidney being born with a somewhat bad back and leg. He wore a leg brace when he was small (and a back brace at times). He frequently suffered with back pain.

I was their 3^rd child, born in early 1946, and was given each of my grandfathers’ names, Richard Gordy. I was born at home on a cold winter day. Growing up, I heard talk that at the time I was born; Daddy was in the creek “bottom” (swampy area along a creek) not far away, helping someone cut trees for logs. Likely 1 or more women living nearby came to help with my birth. Possibly, a doctor came to the house for my birth.

Dad had the heart of a farmer. Up until the year I was born, he had never owned his own farm. He had lived on 2 or more different farms, sharecropping or paying rent for the farmland and simple farmhouse they lived in. Soon after I was born, Dad bought his own farm for the first time and moved his family onto it in November 1946, before my first birthday. It was a 40-acre farm with farmhouse, barn for farm animals, a woodshed/chicken house (both in 1 building), an outdoor toilet, and small low hog sheds in the hog pens.

In the early fall of 1948, their 4^th and last child was born at home. They named that son, Joe. So God first gave my parents a daughter and then three sons. All four of us children were born at home which was typical then. Usually a doctor came to the house. Often a neighbor lady would come to assist with the birth.

I am the 2^nd son. I have heard and read that the second son born unto parents typically has an aggressive nature. In many ways, I certainly do.

I suppose most parents desire to have at least 1 son and at least 1 daughter for the special joys that each gender brings to parents. God in His Infinite Wisdom graciously first gave my parents 1 daughter for the joy a girl brings. Then He gave them 3 sons that were much needed in the family to do strenuous manual farm labor. And we boys did plenty of that.

Upon buying his own farm as a young husband and father of 3 in late 1946, Dad lived on that same farm until he died in April 2003. He certainly wasn’t a wanderer. He stayed put. Thus, that farm was the childhood home place for all 4 of us children. Janiece had started the 1^st grade of elementary school in September 1946 just over 2 months before Dad moved us to that farm. And we 4 children always had that home to go back to and visit until Dad’s death. I am most thankful for childhood memories of an old fashioned farm as my home and for a most settled and stable upbringing in one location.

That childhood home of mine was located about 3 and half miles southwest of Vernon, Alabama on County Road 9, in Lamar County. Vernon is the county seat of Lamar County.

Dad had 8 other siblings and I have 18 first cousins on Dad’s side of the family. Mother had 12 other siblings and I have about 30 first cousins on Mother’s side. The days of my childhood and youth were greatly enriched by having so many cousins to play with and associate with.

Aunt Linnie B. (Mother’s sister) had 6 children. Her family moved periodically, renting a farm to live on and cultivate. For 2 or 3 years they lived on the farm adjacent to ours (down near the creek bottom) when I was 5 to 7 years old or so. We children would walk with Mother down the “old road” ( a dirt road) alongside our fields about 1/3^rd of a mile to their house. Their daughter Polly was just older than Janiece. Their son Bill was about Sidney’s age and Fred was a month older than I. We children had much fun with those cousins nearby.

The majority of my parents’ other siblings lived around Vernon, Kennedy, Millport, Fayette, and Belk in Alabama and Columbus nearby in Mississippi. All these locations were close enough for us to visit most of them more than once yearly (in those ancient days when people were not near as mobile as we are now).

My 1^st memories start in 1950 or 1951 when I was 4 or 5 years old. Though the average life span at that time was much shorter than now, likely there were some 85-year-old folks around me in 1950. If so, they were born in 1865, the year our nation’s Civil War ended. Thinking on that will make you young people think that I am most ancient. How correct you are.

Anyway, my earliest memories in life (1950) are mainly of Mother taking care of me and of me playing with Sidney and Janiece. (Joe was still an infant.) I was attracted to the farm animals, as most children naturally are attracted to any animals around them. We had chickens, hogs, cows, and horses. Most of the time, we had 1 or more dogs and 1 or more cats. We never had a horse give birth. But all the other animals produced offspring from time to time. A baby animal of any kind is especially interesting to a small child. I delighted to see, and was fascinated by the new baby chicks, pigs, calves, and such.

In 1950 a lot of farmers, country folk, and rural people were poor. I mean plenty poor! Of course, some people living in town were poor also. But overall, rural poor folks were further down the poverty scale. My family was way down that scale. At that time, if each family in Lamar County had been rated on a scale of how well off they were financially, no doubt my family would have been in the bottom 10%, possibly the bottom 5% of the county population.

Upon creating mankind, our Creator God clearly gave mankind their life’s work on earth. “There was not a man to till the ground.” Genesis 2:5 “And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of E’den to dress and to keep it.” Genesis 2:15 “Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of E’den, to till the ground from whence he was taken.” Genesis 3:23

When Eve and Adam fell from their created perfect state, mankind became pawns of the devil to be used to build the devil’s kingdom on this earth. The devil’s kingdom comprises most of mankind’s activities except: ①. That of working at taking one’s livelihood from God’s created nature. ②. Basic human government ordained of God “for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well” (I Peter 2:12). ③. And the work that the Lord Jesus Christ commissioned His body (His Church) to do. The Scriptures call that kingdom of the devil the “world” (I John 2:15-17). Since the time of Adam, all down thru the ages, in increasing numbers human souls have left off tilling the ground and have gone to town instead, to build the devil’s kingdom. (Please read of this in detail in my book CREATURE VERSUS CREATOR.) I am most thankful that God ordained for me to be reared in poverty on a dirt farm.

My family’s simple farmhouse of 1950 had been built years before (somewhat crudely) by its previous owner, a farmer (Mr. Otto). It had no foundation as such. Mr. Otto had stacked a few large rocks together in piles in appropriate points, then laid heavy lumber “pillars” horizontally upon the rocks and nailed together a wooden house from there (topped with a wood shingle roof).

There was neither sub floor nor much of a “skirting” around the house between the ground and floor. In hot weather our dogs would go under the house to lie in the cool there. In places, there were gaps between floorboards where we could see the ground below from inside the house. There were occasional knotholes in the floorboards. When I played with marbles in the living room, sometimes a marble would roll to a knothole and fall thru it to the ground below. I would then go outside and crawl under the house to retrieve my marble, often discovering 1 or more other small items that had literally fallen thru the cracks.

When a cold winter wind blew, the wind would enter the house from this “well ventilated” floor and the somewhat “ventilated” walls. It was primitive living. A round, tall metal wood-burning stove stood in the middle of the living room with its stovepipe going straight up thru ceiling and roof. This stove (and the wood burning cook stove in the kitchen) was the only heat we had in the house against winter cold.

Even stoking its fire hotly resulted in the perimeter of the living room remaining cold in times of harshest winter cold. At such times, we habitually sat or stood close to the stove, roasting our carcasses on one side while the other side of our poor bodies froze, rotating sides frequently to allow the opposite side of our flesh to suffer the opposite extreme in temperature. A most pleasant pastime it was (not). I have burn scars visible on both elbows to remind me of the several painful times my childhood elbows contacted the side of that hot metal stove as I stood with my back close to it trying to stay warm. Presently (at age 70), I can view those scars anytime to recall those fond memories.

One of my earliest childhood chores was that of bringing in firewood from the woodshed behind the house to fuel both stoves. Of course, we used the living room stove only in times of cold, but the cook stove in the kitchen had to be fired up 2 or 3 times daily year round to cook our daily meals. So I toted in firewood for it year round. And in the hot summer my family enjoyed the adventure of eating our meals in a sauna-like hot kitchen well heated by that cook stove plus the summer heat that was well felt in this wooden shack with no insulation.

Looking out the kitchen window toward the barn to the west, just 8 feet or so from the kitchen wall you can see our water well with its tall hand pump. As soon as I had grown enough to fetch a somewhat heavy bucket of water, that daily chore was added to my life. Our shack had no plumbing. The outhouse (toilet) set about 20 yards out back right next to a hog pen. It was no fun to journey to the toilet in the dark, rain, or cold.

We took “sponge baths” (“bird baths”) using a tin washbasin. In cold weather, we sponged off near one of the 2 stoves. We boys always had to stay out of the room where Mom or Sis was bathing. In summers, we often filled a washtub about 1/3^rd full of water in the morning and set it out back in the sun to warm all day. Come evening time, we washed in it on the back porch at night, one person at a time from the least to the greatest, Dad being last. On some summer nights, by the time Dad’s bath time came, the water in that tub was plenty muddy.

We had electricity in the house. (In 1950, a very few farm houses still did not have electricity.) In most of our few rooms, a bare light bulb hung down from the ceiling. Also in the front porch ceiling was a light bulb (and possibly one in the back porch also). In addition to these 7 or so light bulbs, we had one old large wooden case radio. These were the only things in that house that used electricity.

Rural electricity was plenty primitive in 1950. Power outages were frequent. When they occurred between evening twilight and bedtime we would light our kerosene lamp (and the kerosene lantern that we took to the barn when we went there in the dark) to give us light in the house during that time of darkness.

We owned no appliance with an electric motor. We did not have an electric washing machine for doing laundry. Two cast iron black wash pots set in the back yard. On washday, we children usually did the chore of filling them with water from the well. Mother would build fires around the pots to heat the water and then wash our clothes by hand on a rub board put into the washtub of warm sudsy water. We hung many of the clothes on the barbed wire pasture fence to dry. We were that crude. And the clothes were durable enough to not suffer much damage from the barbs holding them in place.

Mother did not have an electric clothes iron. For ironing clothes she had 1 or 2 irons made of solid cast iron with a cast iron handle on top. Such an iron was heavy. She would set the 2 irons on top of one of our stoves to heat them and then iron clothes, switching irons as the one in use cooled off. One iron heating on the stove as the one in use cooled off. On cold winter nights, at bedtime she would heat both irons on the stove, then wrap each in a blanket or quilt and place one iron each under the covers at the foot of each of the 2 beds we 4 children slept in, in an effort to keep our feet warm as we slept.

We 4 children slept on two double beds in our living room, Sidney and I on one bed, Joe and Janiece on the other. The light socket hanging from the ceiling had a “pull chain” to pull for Off or On. Daddy tied a string from the short chain to the bedpost of Janiece’s bed so she could pull the light On from the bed when necessary to do so in the dark. Daddy and Mother slept in the 1 tiny bedroom adjacent to the living room westward.

Speaking of bedposts, when poor children rarely got a piece of chewing gum or bubble gum, we typically chewed it forever (or longer). When a child had a piece of gum, it was a custom to take it out of one’s mouth at bedtime, stick it onto the bedpost near one’s pillow and then again insert it into one’s mouth upon awakening the following morning. “Does your chewing gum lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight?” actually was the theme of a vain song we heard on our old radio in those days.

The wood cook stove stood in the back corner of the drab kitchen. It had a small water tank of 2 gallons or so built into the left side and the wood fire heated that water to provide a small supply of hot water. To the left of the stove was a wooden board shelf (somewhat low) on which sat the bucket of well water with a dipper in it and a tin wash pan for washing hands and face. We dipped hot water from the stove and cool water from the bucket. We all drank from that dipper. When a visiting aunt once asked for a glass to drink from, I was totally puzzled as to why she didn’t drink from the “common” dipper.

A 5 gallon metal bucket was placed on the floor under that shelf. We called it a “slop bucket” into which we put food remains that we did not eat (both liquid and solid) and fed that to our hogs. When we children brushed our teeth, we stood over that bucket and spat into it. On occasion when I accidentally dropped my toothbrush into that mush of slop, I was made to retrieve it myself, running my arm down into that warm mush. It felt sickening. Then I would step outside to the well and pump water onto my arm, hand and toothbrush to wash off all the slimy slop. The finest of personal hygiene!

“How did you ever survive to tell us this story??”

‘Only by the Mercy & Grace of Almighty God, thank God!’

To the left of the slop bucket and the stand above it was a small hole of 2-3 inches in diameter in the wood floor. The small end of a quite large metal funnel thrust downward thru that hole, the funnel standing up against that west wall inside the kitchen. We poured used dishwater and wash water thru that funnel and it dropped onto a large rock (about 30 pounds) that Otto or Daddy had placed on the ground below that hole. In warm weather, turning that rock over revealed a large family of earthworms underneath that had moved there for the treasures they gleaned from our wastewater. When we went fishing on the creek, we overturned that rock and dug fish bait (earthworms) there.

Our eating table set in the middle of the small kitchen and was handmade of crude wooden boards. Daddy sat at the head of it in a cane back chair. Mother sat on the window side beside little Joe’s improvised high chair to feed him. Sidney and I ate sitting on a wood bench opposite to Mother and Joe. And Janiece sat on an empty wooden nail keg (turned upside down) at the opposite end of the table from Daddy. Such was our elegant dinette set. None of the crude pieces matched. It wasn’t needful for anything to match. It just needed to roughly serve its purpose, which it well did in its rough forms.

Daddy was our family barber. He would place that nail keg Janiece ate her meals on, onto a cane back chair for height and my brothers and I would sit on that shaky stand one at a time for Dad to cut our hair with old hand clippers (manually operated) that pulled at the hair. When a boy jerked at a painful pull of the clippers, sometimes the sideways force of that jerk sent the jerk of a boy (together with nail keg) tumbling noisily onto the wood floor. This gave the boy a bonus pain from the fall, sometimes followed immediately by a second bonus pain from a slap on the head by the friendly barber as he angrily commanded the boy to sit still. Nail keg and boy customer were reinstated into position by resident barber who continued his cutting with boy customer gritting his teeth striving not to be a jerk as the old dull clippers jerked painfully at hairs.

Some farmer men stopped by individually and asked Dad to cut their hair. Sometimes, that man would cut Dad’s hair in return. Those tall men did not need the nail keg on top of the customer’s chair for height. So we boys were never able to gaze in amusement at one of them tumbling down. The barbershop was located on our front porch during favorable weather. Passersby could observe its operation. And if they timed their passing precisely; the sight of a tumbling chair, nail keg, and tumbling boy customer entertained them.

Instead of a refrigerator we had an icebox made of narrow but thick (for insulation) wooden boards painted green. There was an icehouse in Vernon that made ice in large blocks. The iceman running rural routes in his ice truck came by our house from town about twice a week selling large 25-pound blocks of ice for 25 cents each. When we could afford it, we bought a block of ice to set into the quite well insulated icebox to keep the interior cool. We put our fresh farm milk and home churned butter and such into the icebox. We set a low flat pan on the floor under the hole made into the floor of the icebox to catch drain water from melting ice.

There was a natural water spring in the very back corner of our pasture where our horses and cows drank water. Often, after milking our 1 or 2 cows in the morning, Mother would strain most of the fresh warm milk into a lard bucket, push the bucket lid firmly into place, and then one of us children would take that bucket to the spring and set it down into the cool water to keep it cool (another of my early age farm chores). Then at lunchtime, one would go retrieve that bucket (about a 10 minute walk both ways) to drink milk from it with our meal. Farm families that had a windlass with a bucket on a rope to draw water from their wells (instead of a pump like ours) would let their bucket of milk down into their cool well water to keep the milk cool.

We had a ceramic churn in which we would pour fresh milk and set it near one of the stoves in the winter to warm the milk to cause it to “clobber”. Then one of us would do the churning by hand, grasping the handle of the wooden plunger protruding up thru the hole in the middle of the churn’s lid and bringing it up and down till it churned the milk into butter. After molding the butter that was produced, farm families drank the fresh buttermilk or used it in making delicious cornbread and biscuits.

In those days, farm children typically romped around wildly inside their houses. Occasionally they knocked over the churn of milk setting near the stove, spilling the milk out onto the floor. The guilty child or children typically got a stinging smack from the nearest parent. Then the dogs and cats were quickly called in to lick up all the milk they possibly could before it seeped thru the cracks in the floor. (Put that milk to the best use possible.) The hungry dogs and cats were happy when such spillage occurred. Parents were not happy at all.

When the weather turned cold each November or so, we would then butcher a hog for our family to eat. It was sort of a special event. We children helped build the fire to heat the barrel of water to scald the dead hog so we could more easily scrap off the hair. I liked to turn the sausage grinder and watch the ground meat come out the tiny holes in fine streams. We enjoyed the fresh bacon and sausage for breakfast. The following morning or 2, fresh hog brains would be mixed in with the scrambled eggs on our breakfast. I couldn’t stand the thought of eating brains, so I hungrily did without eggs for breakfast on those occasions. Daddy salted the 2 shoulders and 2 hams and such large hunks of meat and sealed them as well as possible in the meat box in the barn to preserve them till we ate them all. Some years, we gave our pastor at church a ham for his Christmas present.

In addition to the ice truck, the “rolling store” also came by on schedule twice a week or so. Country folks were not so mobile to zip to town often. So (to a degree), the town came to us. Similar in appearance to the ice truck, the rolling store was a truck with a completely “closed in” bed (tall sides and roof). It was packed with basic items farm families bought. When we had more fresh eggs than we needed for ourselves, Mother could trade eggs to the rolling store merchant for some of his goods. Mother also traded eggs, butter and such to stores in town for their goods she needed. Occasionally she would get one small candy treat for each of us children.

A tinker also made his rural rounds occasionally, stopping at each farmhouse to ask if they had any pots, pans, buckets or such in need of repair. All such vessels were made of metal (no plastic in those days). When a hole wore thru the metal, the tinker would insert a short slender bolt thru it with a large thin washer both on the outside and the inside of the vessel. Then he would tighten down the small nut tightly while shaping the thin flexible tin washers to fit snuggly against the inside and outside of the vessel in hopes of preventing any leakage. It was a sight to behold such vessels in use. It was not the “age” of disposables or the “age” of replacing such an item simply because it had developed a defect. In our poverty, we used each item as long as possible.

Another chore I inherited at an early age was that of gathering eggs from the hen house out back. That was a simple chore and would have been pleasant except that the hens often wanted to “set” on their eggs to hatch them into a family when our family wanted to eat their family before it came into existence.

Mother would send me on that mission by firmly telling me to just slide my hand under the warm “setting hen” sitting on the straw nest, slowly feel around under the hen for the eggs and extract them one by one. Then I would slowly walk to the hen house in fearful dread to face a stubborn hen with a mean look in her eye that clearly told me: “Little farm boy, on this fine morning if you want to save that little hand of yours from some painful pecking that just might deform it too badly to ever pilot a military jet aircraft, you had better think twice about sliding it under me to rob me of my precious little chicks before I can even hatch them.”

The rapid forceful pecks from that sharp beak hurt my little farm boy hand several mornings. Thank God those assaults from hens did not deform the hand and later it became the hand of a jet pilot. One morning as I climbed up the makeshift ladder to the shelf of hens’ nests, I was relieved to see that no hens were on the nests at this time, making for easy egg gathering. But as I reached the top and peered into the nearest nest, I saw the reason for all mother hens being absent. A mottled black chicken snake lay coiled in one nest, having swallowed the eggs that were there. The sight of it filled me with sheer fear causing me to fly faster than any jet into the house to Mother. She came and killed the snake.

Mother had quilting frames and when she often sewed quilts for our bedding; she hung the frames from the living room ceiling in cold or inclement weather and hung them from the front porch ceiling in good weather. We bought flour in 50-pound cloth sacks for baking our breakfast biscuits (and most rarely to bake a cake or teacake cookies). Those cloth flour sacks (and the cloth sacks containing 100 pounds of farm fertilizer that we bought yearly) usually had simple color designs on them with the intent of poor folks using the cloth material for sewing clothes. From those cloth sacks, Mother would sew dresses and skirts for her and Janiece and shirts for us boys. We wore many homemade clothes.

Mother would save some of her egg and butter money till she could afford to buy something to better our life. I think she bought Daddy his first electric barber clippers (as a present to him, Christmas or birthday or Fathers Day) to replace the manual clippers operated by hand much like a pair of scissors. I think those clippers were the 1^st appliance we gained that had an electric motor. Till we gained the clippers, only the few light bulbs and our one radio used electricity.

In 1950, our family’s 15 year old 1935 Dodge car was our only possession that had a gasoline engine. (If you care to, likely you can easily “search” a picture of a 1935 Dodge.) A few farm families did not own a motor vehicle (car or truck). Such families went to town by horse and wagon. If the man went to town alone and did not plan to bring much of a load home with him, he usually walked. When walking on a rural road, it was highly likely a Good Samaritan passing in a motor vehicle would stop and give the walker a ride.

I heard our next-door farmer neighbor, Mr. Jack Parson (born in the 1890s), tell this true store that likely occurred in the 1940s or possibly the 1930s. One time there was no flour in their house for making biscuits and no money either. Jack and wife had 8 children (though several of his youngest kids likely had not yet been born at the time of this incident). Penniless Jack walked the 3 and half miles to Vernon praying desperately for God to miraculously provide a 50-pound sack of flour for his hungry family.

Arriving in Vernon he went to the north side of the Yellow Front Store on the courthouse square, stood on the sidewalk, leaned back against the brick store wall praying hard that some passing soul would give him a little money. A cold wind was blowing from the west. Darkness fell causing an even more hopeless feeling to fall upon Mr. Jack. He cried out desperately to God, “Lord, how can I go home to my hungry family with no flour for making bread!?”

As the cutting cold wind was blowing leaves, trash papers and such past him, he spied a $5 bill flying his way on the wind. His heart leaped within him!

“When that money reached me, I just put my big foot on it to hold it down. It’s a wonder I didn’t start shouting and jumping for joy and thereby let that money fly on away. But I held my foot on it, praying about what to do. That was a lot of money that someone had lost. But I felt sure that God had answered my desperate pleas by sending it to me. I quietly reached down, picked up the $5 bill, took it into a nearby store, bought a 50 pound sack of flour, put it on my shoulder and it seemed light as a feather as I walked home with it (3.5 miles), praising God and so thankful for this miracle of giving me food to take home to feed my family!”

I think Mr. Parson said that 50 pounds of flour cost 50 cents. If so, that sounds like Great Depression prices (1929-1933) when men rejoiced to find someone to hire them to work hard about 10 hours a day for 50 cents pay. Also think on him toting that 50-pound sack 3 and half miles to his house, switching it from one shoulder to another along the way. In those days, people walked, often carrying heavy loads.

One day in the early 1950s, 3 farm men came walking by our house on the road and stopped to talk with Daddy a while. Likely elderly Mr. Hankins wanted that short chat time for a break because he quickly dropped the wooden log from his shoulder that he was carrying. I estimate that log weighed about 50 pounds.

At such times farmer men would squat, look around for a twig or any small piece of wood, take out their pocketknives and slowly whittle the wood into shavings as they leisurely talked and rested. It was a relaxing thing to do. When they left, small piles of wood shavings remained on that spot.

(A pocket knife was a necessary tool to the farmers. Each man kept a large one handy in his pocket because the need to cut something came often. When 2 or more men congregated, they often took out their knives to compare them and sometimes swapped knives.)

After these 3 men chatted with Dad briefly, Mr. Hankins heaved a burdensome sigh as he lifted that heavy log onto his shoulder again and continued walking toward his house a mile further up the road toward town. Likely someone had just given him that log free. He wanted to make use of it. So he toted it 2 miles or so home. Those tough times made for tough strong men.

The 1950s more or less brought an end to an era of rural people walking much, “God-ordained” walking being the only available means of locomotion for many of them. The many walkers included tramp-like strangers who would stop by farmhouses to ask for a bite to eat when they got hungry. By 1950, such tramps were most rare and soon faded from the scene.

But late one afternoon when my family returned home from working in the field, someone had come into the house and eaten much of the food on our kitchen table. It was our custom upon eating lunch to cover the dishes of food on the table with a tablecloth to keep flies and other insects off the food. Then the whole family went to a nearby field for the little children to watch all others work till suppertime. This day when we returned home to eat supper, some stranger had helped us with that task. He didn’t have the heart of a thief. He was simply hungry. No, we usually didn’t lock the doors when we went to work in the field.

On returning from the field a different day, Daddy saw that one of the 2 milk cows had about 1/4^th of her tail cut off. Daddy “doctored” the bleeding “stump”. We all spread out and walked thru the pasture looking for the cutoff portion. One of us spotted the end of the tail in the wooded area of the pasture, lying in a small low fork in a tree. It was not wedged tightly into the fork, so the cow had not pulled against it to pull it apart. It looked like someone had cut it off and laid it there, a mystery we never solved.

I had just gotten old enough to play outside somewhat with Sidney when he started school at the beginning of September 1950. From then till I started school 2 years later, I often played outside alone. One day when I saw an old “kitchen knife” lying in the back yard, I picked it up and went “hunting” in the nearby woods behind the woodshed. I picked out a tree, pretended it was a bear and fiercely repeatedly stabbed it till I was sure that bear was dead. Then I eyed a different tree close by and likewise attacked that “tiger” with my knife, killing it in similar manner. I soon went into the house to excitedly report my “hunting” success to Mother.

Some man we knew was in the house talking with Mother, having dropped in as he walked by. I walked right up close to Mother’s chair excited with my big news. ‘I killed a bear and a tiger!’ Mother reacted favorably to my great feat. But that man poked fun at me.

“So you killed a bear and a tiger, did you?” He laughed loudly in ridicule and jest at me as he spoke. That greatly perturbed me. Some people just can’t appreciate a great hunter.

On a different day I was out back of the house playing alone. Some neighbor kid or church kid had given me 3 or so bills of play money. Even tho it wasn’t real money, the sight of it greatly fascinated me. ‘This is the greatest!’ So I immediately pondered ‘Is there play money in Heaven?’ I wanted to know immediately so I went into the house and asked Mother.

“No,” she answered bluntly and uninterested. I was greatly disappointed. I went back outside thinking that I didn’t really care to go to Heaven if I would not have any play money there. Thank God I outgrew that foolishness. But tragically I see many souls choosing many “play things” of this world instead of choosing to go to Heaven. Don’t you dare to be foolish enough to do that and thus journey to eternal damnation in Hell.

Almighty God was most Gracious to give me Christian parents. That instilled within me rich knowledge of my Creator God from the very start of my eternal existence resulting in me never questioning the Truth of the Existence of God or The Truth of God’s Holy Bible being totally True, never to be doubted nor questioned nor lightly esteemed by me in any way. Each time my family sat down to eat a meal; one of us prayed a prayer of thanksgiving for the food and for all of God’s blessings to us. Early on, we children memorized a short mealtime prayer for kids and came to take our turns praying over the meal set before us.

“God is great. God is good. Let us thank Him for this food. By His Hands we must be fed. Give us, Lord, our daily bread. Amen.”

Until I left home to go to a university at age 18, each time I was called on to give thanks at our family meal table; I quoted that simple memorized prayer, not really praying from the heart. Still, that was far better than being raised by atheist parents.

After supper, both Daddy and Mother usually had plenty of chores to do (inside or about the house). When Daddy finished his chores, he usually sat down with his Bible in his hands gazing on it. As bedtime drew near, he would announce “Luke Chapter 14” (or whatever chapter he was to read that night). He was a man of few words. He didn’t call on us to now sit down quietly for Bible reading. But when the Scripture was announced, we knew to stop playing and to sit and listen quietly as he read 1 chapter and then prayed. Then we kids were put to bed.

At that time, there were no “Christian” radio stations in that area. But the secular radio stations were more Christian than many modern day Christian radio stations. We listened to much preaching and Gospel singing on that old radio in our house. Housewives sang to God daily as they went about their household work. Men sang to God as they worked in the fields. Such godly influence was most beneficial to me spiritually.

Until I started school, going to church was generally my most enjoyable weekly event. My family attended faithfully, Sunday mornings and evenings and Wednesday evenings at 7 PM. I especially enjoyed the Sunday School class at 10 AM and the League (Training Union) class at 6 PM on Sundays mainly because I was in a group of children my age and was taught on my level.

My parents were members of the Vernon Free Will Baptist Church located in town. Elderly Brother Warren was our pastor, with a shiny baldpate except for a narrow rim of hair around his head at ear level. “Cut my hair like Brother Warren’s!” That’s the order my little brother Joe gave to Daddy once as Daddy sat Joe upon the nail keg for Daddy to cut his hair. The next time we went to church, Daddy just had to share Joe’s desired haircut with Pastor Warren. Pastor seemed pleased, honored, and certainly amused by Joe’s request.

One summer Sunday morning as Pastor Warren was standing behind the pulpit praying (likely every eye in the church was closed except mine), I saw a large red wasp fly up to Pastor and alight on the side of his bald head just above his ear. I knew from experience just how painful that wasp’s sting was. Now my eyes grew wide open as I wondered how Pastor would handle this potentially stinging situation. Without opening his eyes or ceasing to pray, he calmly placed the “heel” of his open hand against his head behind the wasp and swept his hand forward against the wasp, which caused it to fly away without stinging him. Likely I was the only soul in church that day unspiritual enough to have my eyes open during prayer to observe that marvel.

Every summer, our church had a weeklong revival. In the early days of my life, during revival week, they held a daytime service in addition to the night service at 7 PM. I think the daytime service was usually at 11 AM. On such days, Daddy would make sure we did as much farm work as possible from early morn till about 10 AM. Then we would rush to wash up a little, change into church clothes, and get to church for the 11 AM revival service. When that 1 hour service ended, we went right home, ate lunch, went right back to the farm work till 5 PM or so, then washed up, ate supper and back to church at 7.

Churches abounded thickly in that rural Bible Belt area. Most of them held summer revivals or “meetings” and they were not all held the same week of the year, of course. Daddy liked to visit other churches’ revival services, often just 1 night per church. We enjoyed getting to be with people briefly in churches other than our own church, people we rarely had a chance to visit with.

In the early 1950s, I think we ate together at church only once a year (dinner on the ground) on the designated Sunday in the summer. We prayed it would not rain that day. Some church men would bring sawhorses and long wide wooden boards to church in their trucks that Sunday morning. After the preaching service ended, they set to work setting up several tables outside on the church ground by placing boards across the tops of 2 saw horses to make one table. The women set to work spreading the table clothes they brought from home onto the crude tables and then the baskets, pots and dishes of food they had brought. All souls stood quietly while 1 man offered a prayer of thanks and then the church folks partook and ate together. Delicious foods (never seen in our poor house) abounded on those tables. I joyfully ate all my small belly could hold and deeply regretted its limited capacity.

Perchance it was raining at that time; we took the food into the church sanctuary and ate in there. Our church had no fellowship hall or kitchen facilities. It was a 2 story building, the 2^nd floor being the sanctuary. Out front, outdoor concrete and brick stairs led straight up to its entrance that included a small covered porch. The 1^st floor was Sunday School rooms with the separate entrance to its hallway under that outside stairway. Two tiny restrooms were located downstairs.

There were no indoor stairs. All souls met in the sanctuary at 10 AM Sunday for SS introduction. After a song, prayer, short speech and such, we children and young people were dismissed to our classrooms downstairs while the adult class met in the sanctuary (only 1 adult class, I think). Daddy was our SS superintendent. When SS time ended, he pushed the button upstairs that sounded the buzzer in the hallway downstairs and we young’uns and our teachers then trooped upstairs at that signal. When it was pouring rain at the time of those 2 movements, we young’uns trooped up and down in the rain.

My family visited small (out of town) country churches, which lacked either rest rooms or Sunday School rooms (or both), simply a small one-room (sanctuary) church. I watched them divide up into four SS classes, 1 class in each corner of the small room, each teacher speaking in a low voice so as not to hinder the other 3 classes.

Early on, my parents trained us 4 kids to go relieve ourselves before getting into the car to go to church and then to hold it till we got home. Though there were simple restrooms at church, we were to use them only if absolutely necessary. If and when we did so, after leaving church the user might be severely interrogated by parents as to just how necessary that trip was.

Church time was a most reverent time of worshiping Almighty God in Heaven. Little else went on at church. In those ancient days, adults the age of my parents (and older) were God-fearing to a great degree that modern-day Christians cannot comprehend. God’s Holy House was not a place for kids to nonchalantly sinfully lie about repeatedly needing a drink of water or needing to use the rest room in order to mischievously hang out with equally sinful church kids at those 2 locations in the church building. And old-fashion Christian parents were quick to use the rod against such sin in God’s house.

Kids in the rural churches with no restrooms were more strictly taught to tend to nature’s call before leaving home and to hold it during church. If one absolutely had to go while at church, they typically walked deeply enough into nearby woods to gain the necessary privacy.

(I observed old-fashioned church steadily evolving into a place to eat, drink, play, make merry, have fun and become the modern Laodicean church that Almighty God is soon to spue out of His Mouth.)

As I steadily grew, around the age of 5 or 6, I would ask Mother to let me go to Daddy working in the field. She would allow me to walk alone from the house down to the field where Daddy was farming with our team of horses. If he were plowing, I enjoyed walking along behind him. His footsteps were well imprinted into the freshly plowed dirt and I liked to stretch my stride trying to place my footprints into his (and that was a straining stretch for little me). What a wonderful thing for a little lad to just naturally, literally follow in his farmer father’s footsteps!

‘Would you like me to sing you a song?’ I asked Dad one warm day as I followed him in such manner, so desirous to sing to him. (I was either 5 years old, or had just turned 6.)

“OK.”

‘Silver and gold. Silver and gold. Everybody’s searching for silver and gold. If you’re alone when you grow old, everybody’ll be searching for silver and gold.’ (No, I didn’t learn that song at church.)

Upon finishing that short song, I waited for his verbal response, my little, tender heart hoping for words from my own Daddy that would make me feel good about singing to him (from my heart, my heart’s desire, and just for him, my own Dad!).

But I got only silence from Dad, much to my great disappointment. Still, for a few more months or so, I continued such verbal assaults upon him because they naturally sprang from my little boy’s heart.

Parent! Parent-to-be! Listen carefully now! The natural changes that came over my tender little soul (due to Dad being a person who spoke ever so very little to me beyond basic instructions needful to carry on our daily life’s activities) was nothing less than a phenomenal marvel!

Firstly, my little mind readily perceived that he was not a person who would interact with me verbally.

Secondly, to a large degree my little heart and soul just naturally ceased (shut down, shut off) trying to verbally communicate with Dad. And it did so in an amazingly short period of time.

And thirdly, I just naturally sought out and turned to other human souls who would carry on conversations with me. This naturally resulted in Daddy being relegated to a back seat in my life. I did not have to sit down and study long and seriously about making those changes at all. I did not make them in revenge, malice or spite. Those changes just naturally came to me with no effort on my part at all!

The overall result was that I never really felt very close to my Dad during all of his life. I think that is most regrettable.

That was simply my Dad’s nature, to be overly silent toward his children. This most godly upright Christian man was just being true to his nature by doing so. He did not purposely go about to “short change” his children. Therefore, before The Judge of all the earth, I have no grounds on which to fault him or judge him for doing as his nature dictated. However…

Parent (and parent-to-be), such just might be your nature also. If so, please listen to God’s Holy Spirit. He might be trying to tell you that He desires to give you the Divine Help necessary to overcome that nature and to enable you to talk to your offspring appropriately and sufficiently enough to form the exact bond of closeness that our Creator God ordained be formed between parents and their children.

Thru out my formative years, I was most blessed in that I spent much time with my Dad (able to do so because he didn’t work a job away from home but rather farmed at home where I could literally follow in his footsteps from the time I was able to stretch my narrow step enough to do so).

But Christian reader, during all the formative time as I grew (a period of time most valuable in forming my character, aspirations, goals in life and such vitally eternally important matters in which a Christian parent has daily opportunities to encourage me much with their positive input), not one time did my fine Christian Dad ever say anything like the following to me.

“What was your Sunday School lesson about?”

“What was your League lesson about? Did your teacher give you a part to read aloud before the class in League last night?”

“What songs do you all sing in your SS class?...Sing one of them to me.”

“Which of the congregation songs do you like best?...Can you sing a few verses of it to me now from memory?”

“Have you memorized any Bible verses in Sunday School?...Can you quote one of them to me now?”

Had he spoken such to me, my little heart would have most joyfully responded to the fullest. And then it would be natural for a Christian father to tell me that it pleased him much to hear such profitable words and songs coming from my mouth. But it simply was not my Dad’s nature to do such with his children. If it is not your nature, Christian parent, possibly God desires to re-create your nature. You only get one shot at rearing each of your offspring. It gravely behooves you to make that a good shot, for all eternity!

Spring of 1952 (shortly before I started school in September that year), I was following Dad’s footsteps as he guided our 2 farm horses pulling the wooden drag that smoothed the field he had previously broken with the breaking plow and disked with the disk. All that work was done by the horses and Dad to prepare the soil for planting, the final touch before planting being this “dragging the field” to smooth it.

The handmade drag (made by Dad) was 5 or 6 wide thick heavy wooden boards (each about 7 feet long) nailed together. That 7-foot length of the boards formed the width of the drag. The 2 end links of a short chain were nailed or bolted into the front board a few feet apart, a “double tree” was hooked onto the middle of that chain, to which a “single tree” from each of the 2 horses’ trace chains was hooked for the horses to pull the drag. (You might be able to “search” a picture of those “trees”.)

“Do you think you could do this (the dragging) by yourself? I’ll show you how. I want to go set that field afire (the adjacent field) to burn off the sage before I break it with the breaking plow.” My little ol’ 6-year-old heart leaped with joy at the prospect of stepping into the adult role of working a pair of horses in the field. So I eagerly and proudly assured Daddy that I measured up to the task. He went another round to give me a few pointers, then turned the horses and the drag around at the edge of the field next to the Old Road, stopped them and handed me the 2 plow lines. (The Change of Command to a farmhand far more junior in rank.)

Standing beside the drag with a plow line in each little hand, I gave the horses the verbal “giddy up” signal and headed them straight toward the far edge of the field, walking beside the drag and feeling ever so proud to have so suddenly become a grown-up (but ever so soon to experience Almighty God in Heaven painfully humbling my proud soul).

A fence ran along the other end of this field. Approaching it, I went to the right side of the drag and pulled on the right line for the horses to turn around 180 degrees to the right. Thank God I completed that turn well (and the following turn next to the road that was easier because I could give the horses more leeway letting them go out onto the dirt road as they turned).

But when I reached the fence the 2^nd time, my amateur mind failed to start turning the horses in time before they got to the fence. Seeing them confused as to what they were supposed to do when they reached the fence (having not received any guidance from me), I pulled firmly on the right line for them to turn tightly, as was now necessary. They obeyed well, but their tight turn caused the right edge of the drag to “dig” into the soft earth causing the heavy drag to lift straight up sideways on its right edge and then fall over inverted to the right.

Guess which side of the drag this little farmer was standing on. You guessed “right”!

And that heavy drag crashed right down on my small being. My Loving Protecting Lord saw to it that the drag hit me from the side, knocked me down sideways prone onto the ground pushing me into the soft, plowed soil, and landed on top of my humbled being, giving me just a few scrapes and bruises but no major injuries. Had I been standing 2 steps further away to the right, likely the inverted left edge of the drag would have struck the top of my head, breaking my skull and thus saving you the drudgery of reading this long story of my life. Truly, God protected me from serious head injury or broken limbs (possibly from death) and I am most thankful for that (and for the humbling).

Upon the drag turning over, both horses immediately obeyed their Creator’s command to them to stop and stand still. Had I fallen off a moving tractor into or under its cultivating equipment, the tractor would have just kept moving, much to my detriment. “Show us the old paths.”

Tho it wasn’t Daddy’s nature to speedily locomote himself physically, my frantic yells and screams brought him to me at a speed akin to that of an Olympic sprinter (though in farmer stride form). He quickly lifted the drag off of me; made sure I wasn’t badly hurt, and then led me another round with the drag, showing me how to start turning the horses just before they reached the fence. I made sure I did so, as I continued dragging the field (with a few painful spots on my body and a humbler spirit).

As this farm boy grew, he graduated from plowing on the farm with 1 or 2 horses, to plowing the fields with a tractor, to driving cars, trucks, motorcycles and buses, to “plowing” through the high skies solo in swift military jet warplanes (all in a period of 18 years). By God’s grace, I learned all those “plowing” lessons well. I learned that Safety comes first. Most importantly, I learned that “Safety is of the Lord”. (Have you learned that??) And I thank God that by His Abundant Grace He has thus far kept me safe thru all such worldwide and sky-high “plowing”.

Our horses were named, of course. As a little tyke the first pair I remember were Bess and Ruby. This day, I was “dragging” the field with Bess and Ruby. When I was about 5 years old, I was thrilled to start riding horses (at first, with an adult or teenager riding on the same horse). Farm labor went on 6 days a week. On Sunday afternoons we children played and play was more fun when visitors came at that time.

One Sunday afternoon, 5 of us young’uns (together at one time) had mounted Bess and were riding her bareback (no saddle) in the pasture. The largest youth sat in front as the “driver” and we 4 smaller kids were lined up behind him in a row front to back astraddle Bess (each of us with both arms locked around the torso of the child in front of us in an effort to hold on). The driver up front held the reins in one hand and grasped “hold” of Bess’s mane with the other hand.

We started down the hill to the lower pasture. Going downhill, Bess naturally “braked” by almost stopping each time she put down each front hoof. When Bess’s right front hoof firmly jolted down and almost stopped, the inertia caused the line of 5 souls astride her to lean right. Next, when the left front hoof did likewise, it brought the line of 5 kids leaning left. With each change of direction, the angle at which we leaned increased. It became inevitable to all 5 souls that we would all soon topple and that nothing could be done to prevent it. So we just waited a few seconds till the inevitable happened.

On our right side was the fence between the pasture and hog pen. All five little souls so desired that the inevitable topple be to the left. Guess which direction we all toppled. You guessed “right” again. All 5 kids toppled “right” onto the fence, each child striking the top of the wire fence at a slightly different location on his or her body. It is a miracle that there were no serious injuries. It is a miracle that I lived to write an autobiography. Thank Thee, Lord Jesus.

Come cotton-picking time each September, Mother picked cotton with Daddy. She and Daddy would take their small children to the field with them, set the infants down and watch them as the 2 of them picked cotton. When each child reached about 4 years of age, then the child started helping, walking along with 1 parent, picking cotton and putting it into the parent’s sack.

I liked picking that soft, white, fluffy stuff and playing on top of a wagonload of it. After Daddy weighed each full sack and wrote down the weight, he or Mother would throw the sack onto the wagon and shake out the cotton. We kids had fun tromping it down with our feet (to pack it). When we got a complete bale on the wagon, Daddy would drive the horses to town pulling that wagon to the cotton gin at the foot of Water Tank Hill to have the cotton ginned while the rest of the family busily picked cotton. That is, until we completely finished picking all the cotton. Then Daddy allowed the kids who wanted to ride to the gin the treat of riding there on our last bale of cotton.

I always looked forward to that annual trip, fascinated by the sight of a man at the gin vacuuming the cotton off the wagon thru a large metal tube that sucked the cotton up and shot it into the gin that separated the seed that later got dumped back onto the wagon for us to take home and feed to the cows. I watched wide-eyed as large machinery compressed the bale of cotton ever so tightly, a man banded the bale, and slowly released the vice that compressed the bale, allowing it to swell against the strong metal bands as it “groaned”. Soon the bale tumbled out of the vice, and he used hooks to snag the bale and “walk” that heavy bale of 400 to 500 pounds by hand to set it nearby.

When Daddy took quite a load to town or hauled a load back home from town, he usually made the trip by horse and wagon. Each time he let me go with him, it thrilled my soul. I was most privileged to experience old fashioned farming by man-power and animal-power (horse power) in the early 1950s, our old 1935 Dodge car being the only gasoline motor machine our family had. Our simple, natural farm life in poverty (firmly rooted and settled on this one farm location during all the days of my upbringing) put my life on a most stable foundation at the start of my earthly journey. I am most thankful to have started my eternal existence in that fashion.

But standing with little brother Joe on the wooden front porch, regularly watching the big yellow school bus come and go each day (with a load of kids on it going to school in town) made me long for the coming day when I too would be allowed to get on that bus with them to go live my life in man-made society (the devil’s world) instead of living with family on God’s created soil-farm. Even to this small boy’s mind of most limited understanding, the devil’s world seemed much more exciting and intriguing than God’s serene beautiful nature with a variety of fascinating animals.

On to Chapter 4

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