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| Conrad and Richard going fishing |
Youngsters today would
be at a loss to amuse themselves without their cellphones, computers, and
televisions. Several years ago some of
the first reality programing on television was done by PBS, Frontier House in
2002. The premise was to place a few
families in the “wilderness” where they would have to live like pioneers. I
hate reality programing, but watching these families come undone was fascinating. It certainly showed the disconnect between
our roots and our now. The 1930s Ozarks
were not that far from the pioneers.
Our amusements
were naive and simple but I do not recall that us kids ever lacked for
something interesting to do. We never
heard of Little League and, back in those country hills, there were no Boy
Scout Troops. Richard and I did have a
tattered copy of the Boy Scout Manual that we learned a lot of useful things
from, but mostly all we lacked was enough time to do all the things we would
like to do. I do not remember ever being
bored.
During the hot
summer a principal activity was to go to the creek, do some fishing, and have a
swim. There were no game wardens in the
hills until later years and our tackle was very simple. We had seen pictures of rods and reels in the
Sears Roebuck wish book but no one had one.
Instead, for a quarter at Grandpa’s store we could buy a complete
fishing line. It was ten or twelve feet
of green line, a small sinker, a long-shank hook just right for small catfish and
perch, and a cork bobber. Such a “store
bought” fishing line came wound on a little wood frame that fitted very snugly
in a back pocket of those bib overalls.
Bait for the
little catfish and sunperch in Maze Creek was no problem. We often dug big worms from the rotting
manure pile behind the barn. An ideal
bait can to carry them in was either a Sir Walter Raleigh or Prince Albert
empty flat tobacco tin. That, too,
fitted snugly in a back pocket.
If we had not
taken time to dig worms or did not find some right away, we could always catch
some grasshoppers in the pasture on Bertha Beck’s farm on our way to the
creek. A perfect receptacle for those
was that button pocket on the bib of our overalls. Of course sometime we forgot and left some in
there later which did not make Mother very happy when our overalls showed up in
the laundry.
Neither was a
fishing pole a problem. Along the creek
bank there was lots of underbrush from which we could cut a fairly straight pol
seven or eight feet long. Willow made a
good fishin’ pole and there were others that were nice and limber, too. We always cut a fresh pole each time because
a dry pole gets brittle and might break just when you had a big one on. That was never a problem because in small
Maze Creek a “big” catfish might be seven inches long and most of the sunperch
were smaller than your hand. We kept
everything we caught even if they were hardly bigger than a pumpkin see.
We would put the
fish we caught on a stringer (a switch cut from a bush) and keep them fresh in
the water, then carry them proudly home and spend maybe an hour tediously
cleaning them. My mother would roll them
in yellow cornmeal and fry them in a black iron skillet. Some of them hardly made two bites, but they
were delicious.
A more major
source of meat for the family table, especially in early summer when the young
were almost grown, was squirrels and rabbits.
About the time we moved into that little house south of Bona, when I was
about eleven and Richard thirteen, Dad bough a little Remington 22-caliber
squirrel rifle. It was a dandy—a slim
little single-shot rifle with a rolling block breech and a barrel about thirty-two
inches long. When we used long rifle
shells (we used shorts for practice because they were cheaper) that little
rifle was remarkably accurate up to forty or fifty years, which was about as
far as you could see the eye of a squirrel.
Richard and I both
quickly became very proficient with that little rifle. One of our target practice competitions was
to stick a row of kitchen matches in the bark of a down long, then, from fifteen
or twenty yards, see who could light the most matches without knocking them out
of the log. The trick was to shoot so
that the bullet just missed the head of the match, but came close enough that
the air friction would ignite the phosphorous on the tip of the match.
When hunting
rabbits with that little twenty-two, we did not feel bad when we hit on in the
body. After all, a rabbit can run pretty
fast and it takes a pretty good shot to hit him anywhere on the run. We never considered using a shotgun for
either rabbits or squirrels for three reasons: One, it was not sporting, two
the scattered shot spoils some of the meat, and three, we were not allowed to
carry Dad’s single-shot 12-guage shotgun until we were older. Apparently Dad felt that shotguns were too
dangerous for youngsters. If we had
accidentally shot ourselves in the foot with the twenty-two it would only make
a small hole but a shotgun was potential disaster.
It goes without saying
that most parents aren’t going to hand their child a 22 rifle and tell them to
go amuse themselves. And of course, my grandfather had taught his boys how to handle a gun safely. The gun wasn’t a
toy, although honing their shooting skills would soon come in handy in preserving
my dad’s and uncle’s lives, as it did for some many of the greatest generation. It also put
food on the table.
