MEN AND TELEVISION

What is it about men and television? I’m sitting here trying to write my blog, and there’s an infomercial on the TV, of all things! This lady’s been bobbing up and down on an air mattress (and, no, it’s not an X-rated commercial) and flapping her jaws for the past five minutes. Those are the minutes I’ve been aware of this repetitive noise. My husband left the room about twenty minutes ago!

He does this often, and I can’t figure it out for the life of me. I’ll admit that some of the infomercials feature cute girls. But that doesn’t seem to be a consistent choice of his. What does he like about them?

And weather reports! Channel 14 has “Weather on the Ones” every ten minutes. And I’ll guarantee you, this is truly every ten minutes for the entire day! During most of those minutes, he is either somewhere else in the house or asleep in his recliner. Yet the weather report goes on and on. It doesn’t change too much in ten minutes although, like a clock, if you wait long enough you will notice that there has been some movement.

If you ask me, his taste needs some movement!

.

RETIRED

When I was working I had plans to do so many things when I retired.

But you know, I don’t want to iron any more than I did when I was working!

DRAWING TREES

Almost done. That “Ancient Oak” looks more like a “modern abstract kudzu.” Trees are my Waterloo. No, they’re more like D-Day. I’ve suffered many casualties but I’m going to win.

I’ve done some paintings with pretty good trees, but they were obviously accidents because I didn’t learn a thing from them! With this church painting, I applied everything I’ve ever learned about art and about pen and ink techniques, the most important of which is to NEVER put your pen to that paper in a hurry and NEVER lay down an unplanned line. But then there’s this tree. I broke the rule. I did what I used to do in school - went in unprepared and hoped for the best.

I’m going to beat this devil yet. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

NOT RUINED YET!

I left my art career in the dust in 2001. After fifteen years of hauling paintings to galleries, art shows, and competitions, spending thousands of dollars photographing buildings (sure do wish digital cameras had been in existence then!), teaching workshops, starting art leagues, collecting tools and brushes, framing pictures, I just up and quit!

For the past ten years, I have had no desire to pick up a pencil or a brush. People told me I was wasting my talent. I didn’t care. I was sick and tired of it.

Now it’s back! I love it again! But it sure isn’t like riding a bike. You don’t just hop on again and take off. I have messed up a lot of good starts in the last month or two. I’ve been working on this current drawing for ten hours now and haven’t messed it up yet! Wish me luck. I need lots of it – and practice!

DRIVING TO BRUNSWICK, GEORGIA

One of Grandpa's stories

While I was still in high school, I started living in an old house that belonged to the state. I stayed with Luther Glen. He was a bachelor and he was a state dairyman. The state gave me a hundred percent maintenance plus I think it was $25 a month or something like that - which was big money then. And it was great to even have a job.

Things went to changing. The war came on, and that put everything to moving. The farm superintendent at the blind institution, Mr. Boone, lived next door to me. One of his sons, Roy Boone, had gone to Brunswick, Georgia, to go to work with J. Jones Construction Company, which was building liberty ships on the river there that came into Brunswick.

He came home one Christmas talking about the opportunities that were down there and how much money they were paying and all that. He and his wife were going back after Christmas.

There was a big demand for welders working on ships because they had a tremendous amount of close places to get that bigger people just could not get. At that time I weighed about 118 or 120 pounds, real slim and trim.

I didn’t put any significance on being the assistant dairyman for the state. So I asked him, I said, “I’ll just go back down there with you.”

He said, “You’d be a natural. They’ve got a welding school down there.”

I told him, “I don’t know how to get down there or nothing.”

He said, “You can go back with me.” He and his wife had an apartment down there.

So I went home and told Mamma just right off the bat from one day to the next that I was going to Brunswick, Georgia. She had a pure damn conniption, and said I wasn’t going. I said, “Well, I am going.”

So I rode back down there with him. In fact, I drove the whole way. That was part of the deal. I didn’t know anything about driving licenses back then. Didn’t know you were supposed to have one! And the furthest I had ever been away from home was the distance I could ride on a bicycle, other than going to Wake Forest to visit my aunt and uncle. And once I rode with my cousin’s husband Jeff to Greensboro and back. And that was the furthest I’d been away from home until I went to Brunswick, Georgia.

Lord, I thought I’d gone slam to the other side of the world. Wrote Mama a letter trying to remember all the towns we’d been through. I thought it was something great. There was umpteen of them or more, and I finally gave up on that part of it.

Weekend Car

One of Grandpa's stories:

When I came along, Papa was doing real well, with the hog farm and the chain of grocery stores. He had bought Frank (who was 20 years older than I was) a Model A Ford Roadster - a beautiful little old car with the rumble seat and everything.

In 1927, the year I was born, Papa bought a brand new Pontiac automobile. Paid cash for it.

It was some kind of nice, with two big spare wheels one on each side, indentions into the fenders up front, and a big old Indian up there on the radiator. Brass radiator and a brass Indian on the radiator cap. In the stomach part of the Indian was a thermometer you could see from the driver’s seat, to read the temperature of the water in the radiator.

It was a four-door. It had special upholstery seats in it with the buttons and all. Curtains on the window. Window shades you could pull up and down just like in a house. Carpet on the floor. Oh, it was fancy. The thing! He built a garage for it, and he drove it up on wooden running boards. Only time he drove the car was on Saturday or Sunday, if you went anywhere. It didn’t get drove otherwise. So, with it out of the weather, it stayed like new for a long, long time.

That was the first car I ever rode in, and for a long time I thought it was going to be the last one, because it just kept staying in the family. We kept all those vehicles during the Depression. When Papa died we didn’t have enough gas to run them, but we still kept that Pontiac in the garage. Later on, my brother went to driving and using it. Sometime during the latter part of the war, something happened to the rear end of it. A fellow there in Raleigh had fixed it one time. Back then you could put up a differential two different ways. If you put it up the wrong way, you wouldn’t have but one forward gear and three backwards, because it was a four-speed transmission. I remember him putting it up backwards and then taking it down and putting it up the other way. That’s what went bad on it finally, and Frank decided he‘d just sell it to Max Bane’s junk yard.

SWILL ROUTE

Another story from Grandpa's childhood in the 1930s

Even though we raised corn, the majority of things we fed the hogs was slops - the leavings from the table. Papa had a route. Every day, we went around through Raleigh and picked up the people’s “swill,” as they called it. It was “slops” when it got to the farm.

There weren’t but three main streets in Raleigh - Fayetteville Street, Salisbury Street, and Wilmington Street. And they ran parallel to one another between the capital building and Memorial Auditorium. That was pretty much Raleigh. The residential areas were around the circumference.

One of our biggest customers was Durwood Green’s grill, right across from the courthouse on Salisbury Street. All the judges and lawyers and stuff like that ate down there. It was a big advantage for him to have someone to come and get that swill out of the way. I don’t think the city even had garbage collection at the time. This was way back. Anyway, Papa had a route. He had a Model T Ford truck he drove around to pick it up every day.

Folks would keep their leftovers from the table separate. They didn’t have anywhere to dispose of that stuff. In town, streets were paved, and most all the lots were just big enough for the house, with a little biddy back yard and very little front yard. Paper and that kind of stuff, you could get rid of. But the leavings from the table, now that was something else. If they threw it out there in the yard, they’d have a bunch of flies and maggots and everything, and Lord knows how much of the other stray stuff. So it was an advantage for them to have somebody to come pick that stuff up and get it away.

They kept it separate and kept it clean and made a special effort to not have any foreign material or paper in that garbage from the table. Papa furnished them a little bucket to put it in. They had a special place to keep it in the house so the flies didn’t get to it. Most of the time, they’d meet him at the back door. He’d dump it in his bucket, and they’d take theirs and rinse it out and set it back in there for the next time. He had a route like that, and that’s what we fed our hogs on.

He’d bring the swill back to the farm. We had a big slop house. That’s what it was called. A slop house. We had 55-gallon wooden barrels that molasses and vinegar comes in. Papa had bought it by the barrel for the store in Raleigh. He would dump that stuff in that barrel. We had a well that we had dug right near the slop house for water. He’d add some water to the slops and we mixed it up with a big old paddle until we’d get it the right consistency, according to how thick it was.

There’s one thing that Papa would add to it, and they called it Red Dog Bran. It was a powdered stuff that he bought in cloth sacks. The sacks were of a type of material like women made their dresses out of. They had all different kind of prints, and that was one of the incentives that made people buy them. They’d go to the store and pick out the pattern.

I don’t know what that Red Dog Bran did for it, but it certainly made it smell better anyway. He’d take a certain amount of that and mix it up, and he’d take five-gallon buckets and dip down in that barrel, one in each hand, and we’d go to the hog pens. Each pen of hogs got a different amount. Of course I was small and I didn’t have to do any of that. I was just there.

That’s the way we fed the hogs. Of course, it’s against the law to do that now. It’s not healthy. They claim it’s a way you can pick up diseases. But back then, nobody knew any different.

SURVIVING OFF THE LAND

I was born in 1927. That was right before the Depression, and times were real good. I was so young when we had a plenty that I don’t remember too much about it. Papa had a very successful grocery store business in Raleigh. My older sister and brother had cars and nice clothes and all that.

Then the Depression hit, and it was a tough go, I want to tell you right now! My sister Hester had known all the upper middle class in Raleigh, and for years and years she was embarrassed to talk about the way we were raised under the Depression. And for a while, I was. But that was my heritage. We did the best we could, and that was just circumstances. And many folks were in the same boat.

Papa had started off with one store in Raleigh. Everything they sold was bought somewhere else. Then they thought of the idea of buying a farm and raising the products to sell in those stores, and that’s the way they expanded. Later on, after the Depression hit, we raised everything we ate on that farm. The only thing we had to buy from the store was flour, because we didn’t raise wheat.

On down into the farm there was a big swamp. Back then we thought you had to have a swamp to raise hogs. Thought you had to have that muddy water, but that’s been proved wrong. Anyway, that’s what Papa bought it for, for us to raise hogs.

They built all the hog pens around the perimeter of that swamp, on the side of the farmland the house was on. Across the swamp on the other side of the farm, we had strawberry beds and raspberry vines and blueberries and all those kind of things - about anything you could think of that a farmer could raise and prepare for himself. We raised a little bit of peanuts over there. Early spring, we’d plant garden peas, spring onions, and that kind of thing. And then what was left of it, we’d plant in corn to feed the hogs.

One of the biggest things we raised was cane. We made our own vinegar and our own molasses from cane. We had our own mill. Our horse Maude walked in a circle and turned the cane mill. The shaft was a tree. It squeezed the juice out of the cane. We had a cooking vat right beside it. We put molasses up in 55-gallon wooden barrels. I don’t remember what process we used to make vinegar.

We made our own soap from the rendered lard from the hogs we killed and Red Devil lye. When the farming operation wound down, and there was nobody there but Bernice and me, Mamma started buying Octagon soap.

But I was young, and I didn’t realize how tough it was on everybody because what you ain’t never had you don’t never miss. Looking back on it, it was a whole lot of fun. And certainly educational! You learned how to improvise and how to do things children don’t learn how to do today. In other words, I could go anywhere and live today. If I had anything to start with at all, I could raise enough off the land to survive. Children that are raised this day and time don’t know anything about surviving off the land.

FILTHY RICH

When I went to Brunswick, Georgia, I didn’t know a thing about putting money in the bank or how to keep money, because I just hadn’t had any money.  I had been helping Dr. Lawrence in the dairy making six dollars a week, and that was big money.  But I’d give Mamma the majority of it, and I’d have a little spending money.

I don’t remember what they paid at the shipyard.  But seems like I came out of welding school there doing regular production welding - what they called plate welding - making something like $1.10 an hour.  And the real good welders that came out of school, they directed them to the shell, which is called shell welding, which is welding the outside of the ship together, and they made like a dollar and a quarter.  But steam pipe welders made $1.75 an hour, and if you welded galvanized you got ten cents an hour bonus.  I didn’t know it at the time, but it was because it would eat your stomach up - and I never knew that until several years later, when I had to learn another trade.  They didn’t tell me anything about it.  So I wound up as a steam pipe welder, and welded the galvanized because that packed $1.85 an hour, and no expense.

I wasn’t interested in anything but working.  So I worked seven days a week.  Saturday I got paid time and a half, Sunday I got double time.  And my pay would be greater than the checks were worth. Paychecks were good for just so much money.  They were yard issued.  So they’d pay me with two checks.

I didn’t have any way to spend any money, and didn’t know where or how to spend money, because the only spending money that I ever thought of was to have a drink and a Nab, and that was the greatest thing in the world.  So I kept it in my pocket.  I got to where I had so much money I didn’t know what to do, and I spread it out on my bunk bed where I lived, just to look at it.  God, I don’t know, fifteen hundred or two thousand, three thousand dollars, you know.  And never had any money in my life. 

I didn’t know what to do with it.  I never thought about banking or nothing else.  So I was filthy rich.