Saying "Good Bye" to Elmdale

 Becoming Land Owners

Daddy had always wanted to farm on his own land.   He hadn’t done too badly farming on the “thirds” and the “fourths.”    But, Daddy got tired of sharing with the landlord.    Since we had come from Clyde, and the family first moved to Clyde in the late twenties or early thirties, he always felt drawn to that little community.  Of course he still had to come up with land payments.

He was particularly impressed with the fact that you could grow all kinds of crops in the sandy soil and that rainfall wasn’t nearly the problem it was in Elmdale.  He managed to come up with the down payment on an 80 acre farm, a mile and half south of Clyde.  There we would raise peanuts, cotton, and truck crops.  I hated tomatoes and sweet potatoes the worst.   Everything about sweet potatoes was hard work.  The worst thing about tomatoes was the harvest. We would pick them every other day.  On alternate days, we took them to Abilene, and called on every grocery store in town.  One guy ran a store out toward the end of Butternut Street.  We always went to his store last because he would take everything we had left.  Of course we had to greatly reduce the price for him.

Saying “good bye” to Elmdale.  The worst thing was saying good bye to Maryleen.  But it was a mixed experience. I said “good bye” to a school where I was a fledgling third string member of the basket ball team.  On the other hand, I also said “goodbye” to a school that had two grades in one room, the old unpainted house with no electricity.  I had dreaded leaving Clyde in 1943, but I dreaded it just about as much when we moved back there in 1947.   I stayed on the “Canada Place” (the farm we bought) until I graduated from high school.  Daddy eventually sold the farm, but he lived out the rest of his life at Clyde.

The Beginning and End of My Dancing Career

Maryleen, My First Love

Somewhere in here, I entered adolescence.  Several changes took place in my life during that time.  For one thing there was an interest in girls. I knew Maryleen Gilliland from the middle of my third grade year until the middle of the seventh grade, but I discovered her in the seventh grade.  She was a petite blond, whom I thought to be about the prettiest thing I had ever laid eyes on.

I couldn’t imagine her being interested in me, but there came a day when I wrote her a note in a lovestruck moment.  I wrote the words, “Maryleen, I love you” on a piece of notebook paper.    I never intended those words to be read by anyone but me but a kid named Ray Eddins saw what I had written, snatched it off my desk, and gave it to Maryleen.  I was horrified.

What would I do if I found out she hated me?   I was too young to join the French Foreign Legion. Could I run away from home and join the circus?  Maybe I could talk my parents into letting me quit school?  How could I ever face her again?  Would she turn up her nose at me? laugh at me? refuse to speak to me? say horrible things about me?  To my great surprise I found out that Maryleen liked the attention.  That created another problem.  I didn’t know how to act around a girl who actually liked me.

 For the next month so we were inseparable.  My whole life was consumed with Maryleen.  We probably made everybody else sick.  They had to separate us on the school bus.  It was about as bad a case if puppy love that you could have. 

One night we got together at a 4-H club Christmas party. For some reason, my parents mingled with the adult.  Maryleen and I ended up in a room that had a juke book.  She asked me if I would like to learn how to dance?  I grew up in an environment where dancing was forbidden.  But it didn’t matter.  Maryleen asked me if I would like to learn how to dance.   She knew she needed to start with something simple.  So she explained the “two step.”  I could barely do the one step.  I’ve got two left feet.  I never aspired to be the heir apparent to Fred Astaire. My parents showed up in a few minutes.  I don’t think they ever caught on to what was happening.  It was just as well.  I was able to get out of the room without stepping on Maryleen’s feet.  That would have been an embarrassment.

My parents broke up the relationship by pulling a dirty trick.  We moved.   I was only fifteen miles away, but I went to a different school, and I might as well have been in Africa.   Maryleen and I vowed to stay in touch.  We wrote two or three letters and then both of us went on to other interests.  Maryleen dropped out of my life forever, but sometimes I wonder whatever happened to her.

Coal Oil: The All Purpose Product

Mosquito Protection, Light, Tractor Power, and Medicine

We had no screens on the windows, and without air conditioning (not even an electric fan) they had to be opened.  But what could you do about the mosquitoes?  Sometimes we bought Gulf spray, which came in a little can with a pump attached to it, but there was no way a little bit of Gulf spray would hold off the hordes of insects.   So we outsmarted them.   The mosquitoes bred in those water drums and we knew enough entomology to figure that out.   Just because we were poor doesn’t mean we were dumb. 

You could poor a little bit of kerosene into each barrel.  Actually we didn’t call it kerosene.  The official name was “coal oil.” I never figured out why.  Kerosene is a petroleum product, not a coal product.  The “coal oil” formed a thin film on top of the water and cut off the oxygen supply of the mosquito larvae, and presto there were no more mosquitoes.    But you have never tasted bad water until you’ve tasted water laced with “coal oil.”   I mentioned this practice to Ann and she had never heard of it.   I guess they must have developed more sophisticated ways of handling mosquitoes in Waco.

“Coal oil” had other uses too.   The tractor – an “Old Regular Farmall” from 1923, had a low compression engine, which would run on kerosene.  The tractor had a starter tank that held about a gallon of gasoline.   You started the cold engine on gasoline, and as it warmed up you switched over to the larger tank filled with kerosene.   Of course it also provided light.  We thought we were really making technological progress when we finally got an Aladdin lamp.

Coal Oil also had medicinal purposes.   When I had a sore throat or a bad cold, my mother usually soaked a rag in turpentine and tied it around my neck.  Sometimes I had to go to school like that, and I’m sure the odor greatly reduced my popularity.  It also prevented exposure to other diseases since no one wanted to get close to you. 

     On top of that it made my neck raw.  But there were times when we didn’t have turpentine, so she would substitute “coal oil.” You were also expected to ingest it.  Just to make sure you got a good dose of it, Mama would take a spoon full of sugar, pour a little kerosene (or turpentine, which ever one happened to be handy) and force me to take it.    It must have worked because I survived it all.  You’d be surprised how much better you can feel in a day when you know what the next cold treatment is going to be.  Ann missed out on the kerosene treatment too.

In those days, it was generally believed that medications had to either taste bad or hurt in order to be effective.   Castor oil and Black Draught were among the medicines of choice.  They were some of the best preventative medicines available.  Usually one dose would affect a cure.  You didn't want to have to take it again, so you said, "I feel fine."

If you got your skin cut and ran the risk of being infected, no one thought about getting a tetanus shot.   I don’t think anybody ever heard of tetanus, or if they had they figured it was something you got in Chicago, not Elmdale.   But they did guard against infection.  They had a liquid medicine called methiolate.  Whatever methiolate touched quickly turned bright red and it stung like bull nettles. (If you’ve never been stung by bull nettles, let me just say it hurts somewhat).  It was believed that the sting of the methiolate pulled the infection right out of your body.  When kids came to school with red blotches on their face and arms, they were always viewed with respect.   They had received battle wounds and the methiolate swatches were their purple hearts. 

German War Prisoners

The war really came home to me when I was nine.   We were still sharecropping, and through Roy Griffith’s connections we contracted with the government to hire German prisoners to hoe our cotton.   They were paid forty cents a day for their labor,  as I recall, which wasn’t much even by the standards of the time, but it was a whole lot more than what American POW’s were getting in Germany.  The prisoners,who came to our field, were expected to work hard but they ate well.   

They were friendly for the most part.   Many of them were quite fluent in English, and I had the opportunity to interact with them.   At first, I was afraid to go the field.  The dreaded Germans were there.  They were Huns – almost savage animals in my view.  What is one of them got loose?  What would he do to me?  In my childish way of thinking they represented the worst evil I could ever imagine.   For the first few days I stayed close to the MP's.  

I was surprised to learn they were normal people just like everyone else.   Most of them didn’t want to be in the war, and we were told that less than ten percent belonged to the Nazi party.  Once in a while we heard about a prisoner escaping, but most of the time they probably didn’t want to.

I especially remember one day when a couple of prisoners wandered away from the field and went to the house where Daddy was working on the tractor or something.  For some reason the MP’s didn’t try to interfere.    At the time I was playing in the yard and one of the soldiers asked Daddy,

“How old is your boy?” 

Daddy said, “He’s nine.”

The German prisoner said, “I’ve got a thirteen year old boy in Germany.   I hope he’s still alive.” 

At that moment we began to understand the emotional pain of warfare.   I even understood it even though I was only nine. War is a terrible way to settle differences between people.  It shatters families, destroys economies, and takes a larger part of the work force from the warring nations for an entire generation.  Several years ago, I had a friendship with a German war bride from World War I.  She married an American soldier, who was assigned to the army of occupation after the war.  She said all the eligible men in her little town were dead by the time she was of marriageable age.

We sort of hated to see the prisoners go on the last day.  The fieldwork was finished by about noon.  Roy, our landlord, took them over to his place.   Roy bought several watermelons and generously fed them to the prisoners.   They thoroughly enjoyed the melons.  After that they went swimming in Roy’s tank and we had great fun watching them laugh and play in the water.  It was nothing but old West Texas tank water tinged by red clay, but when you’re living behind barbed wire fence, a few moments in the water on a hot summer day was a welcome relief.   I would guess those prisoners never forgot that day.

Lying to the Baptists

There was only one church in the Elmdale community and it was Baptist.  They controlled things in the community and the school.  One of my classmates was a boy named Bobby Reik.  Bobby was the Baptist preacher’s son. He seemed like a regular guy.  I seem to recall he was a pretty good football player.

At Elmdale,the school was a Baptist parochial school for all intents and purposes.   We had regular chapel services featuring visiting preachers.   When the Baptists conducted their revival, their evangelist would come to the school and work at getting kids down the aisle.   On one occasion, they wanted to meet with all those who just “got saved,” so they sent us incorrigibles back to the classroom.  There we were shamed for not going forward.   If anyone tried that today, they would be in big time trouble with the ACLU and the Supreme Court, but if there was any opposition to the practice back then, it never got anywhere.  If anyone objected to the practice, he would quickly be branded a heathen.

My parents never objected to these instructions.   I had not attended Sunday School since we left Clyde, so I guess they figured any kind of spiritual instruction would be helpful.   Once, a visiting Bible teacher presented her case for total hereditary depravity.   Of course I didn’t have any idea what that was back then.  She held up construction paper cut in the shape of various colored hearts.   I don’t remember the meanings assigned to the various colors except for the fact that a white heart represented a heart made clean by the grace of God and the black heart represented the heart defiled by sin.  She completed her story by holding up the black heart and saying,  “Every little baby that’s born into the world has a heart as black as this one.”  

That disturbed me and I went home upset.  I told my parents, “Did you know that every little baby that’s born is born with a heart that’s blackened by sin.”    They assured me the Bible didn’t teach that.   We had a conversation about the subject and that was the end of it.   I don’t really think any damage was done.  I was introduced to the doctrine of original sin, and I would eventually make up my own mind about it.

I would have to say that I owe a great debt to the Baptists.   The teachers who came to our school, systematically taught us the Bible, especially the Old Testament.  I owe my basic knowledge of the Old Testament to them. Our preachers didn’t talk about the Old Testament very much.  They called it “The Old Bible.”

I developed an intense interest in Bible study during this time.   The teachers brought a little paper back booklet containing the gospel of John.   If you read it, you got something else and if you read something after that you got a New Testament.   If you read the New Testament, you got a Bible.   Actually I lied about having read it all.   I’m not proud of that fact, but I will say I got interested in Biblical content, although the part about telling the truth telling didn’t sink in too well.   However, I was very interested in the text and soon developed a reputation for Bible knowledge.   They used to have spelling bee type of drills with Bible questions and most of the time they couldn’t sit me down.   That may have influenced my later desire to preach in one way or another.  The kids thought I really knew the Bible.

Once the Baptist evangelist came to our school and we were herded down to the auditorium to hear his sermon.   At one point he said, “If you’ve ever told a lie, I want you to stand up.”  They were masters at making you feel guilty.   Well, I’d told some, so I stood up, but only one or two others in my class stood up.  I had a feeling a bunch of liars were still sitting down.   Then he asked us to remain standing if we had ever told a lied to our teacher.  None of us wanted to deal with that kind of pressure, so we all sat down, even though I actually had lied about having read the entire New Testament.

My Introduction to Classical Music

Mrs. Curry and the "Three B's"

 

At Elmdale Mrs. Curry was our music teacher.   She taught our class in the school auditorium because that's where the only piano in the building was located..   She was  student of serious music.  She taught us about symphonies, and all the various instruments in a symphony orchestra.  She taught us about the three B’s – Brahms, Beethoven and Bach.   She introduced us to Wolfgang Mozart, even though the chances were between slim and none that we would ever take a seat in a concert hall, listen to an orchestra perform The Requiem, and yell “Bravo” at the end of the performance.   

It wasn’t cool for a kid from the farm to be interested in what we called "longhair" music. This was long before the Beatles.  For some reason, the whole thing fascinated me, and many years later, I would come to understand more of what she tried to teach us.  I never forgot the “three B’s.”   College helped with that some.  I did a bit of research on my own, and during the eighties, we actually had season tickets to the symphony.  It was a stretch for a guy who started out on Ernest Tubb  but some of it took.

It must have been a frustrating experience for a refined woman like Mrs. Curry to teach a class of country yokels about classical music. We didn’t go home and sing arias to the cows, but strangely enough I’ve never forgotten that introduction.  I’m not exactly a “patron of the arts,” but I have some appreciation for serious music, and I’m able to identify the melody of many different scores.  It is a mistake to think that teachers in country schools were uneducated hicks, who couldn’t hold a real job.  Many of them had class.  I’ll never know why Mrs. Curry was hired by the Taylor County school board.   And I don’t know if she went home and cried over our failure to appreciate culture, but she did make a contribution to my education.