Old Fashioned Fourth

A big event each year in our part of the Ozarks was the Fourth of July picnic in Greenfield, the county seat of Dad County.  I do not know why it was called a “picnic” because it was far more than that.  It included carnival rides set up all around the courthouse square, hamburger stands, all the usual carnival booths with prizes, a few sideshow tents, and a fireworks display at dark.

During the first half of the year, we boys tried to save some money to spend on fireworks on the 4^th.  We did not usually save much because the rabbit selling season and possum hinting were on in the fall and winter.  My mother, however, always managed to give us enough for some firecrackers, a cap gun, and a hamburger.  I think she sometimes sold some of the chickens to give us fifty cents apiece.

Our fireworks in those days were not subject to the safety regulations we know have and, consequently, were far more potent and a lot more fun.  We were taught the dangers involved and were then on our own.  I never heard of a serious injury involving fireworks; however, we were all subjected occasionally to minor burns, numb fingers, or temporarily deafened ears once in a while.

We had firecrackers that would blow a Maxwell House coffee can fifty feet into the air.  Our cap guns sounded like real revolvers and the Roman candles would send fireballs a hundred feet into the air.

One of our favorite devices we called a “cherry bomb” but it was not a firecracker with a fuse.  It was an innocuous appearing brown ball about the size of a walnut.  It went off on impact like a miniature hand grenade.  Thrown high in the air so it would come down on pavement or thrown at a boulder, a cherry bomb made a soul-satisfying bang.  I recall one 4^th when we saved some of those cherry bombs and had a “war” the next day before Sunday dinner on a rocky hillside near my Uncle Coy Tygart’s spring on the old home place.  Fortunately, there were no casualties.

We usually arrived in Greenfield on the 4^th before noon and spent the rest of the day.  My mother sometimes took biscuit sandwiches for lunch.  Dinner would be a real hamburger from a stand on the square—a nickel for a small plain one or a dime for a big one with mustard and onion.  No MacDonald’s, Burger King, or Wendy’s can compete with the delicious taste of those 4^th of July hamburgers.

Even though we were old country boys from the hills, we were smart enough to know that most of the game booths for Kewpie dolls and stuffed animals were rigged and were nearly impossible to win so we rarely wasted our money there.  Any one of us could have cleaned out a shooting gallery except that they would not allow anything but BB guns in the town square and they were never accurate.

Sometimes we were a bit more gullible about the sideshow attractions.  One time they had a “Wild Man from Borneo”.  There were lurid signs outside the tent showing a savage with bones in his ears and nose sitting in a snake pit.  Occasional wild screams and unintelligible gibberish came from inside.

My curiosity got the better of me and I paid a nickel and went inside.  There was canvas “pit” in the center of the tent and, sure enough, a wild looking brown man with straggling and stringy long dirty black hair was seated in the dirt among several large snakes.  There were some harmless ground snakes and a couple of big rattlers that I figured out right away had been de-fanged because they did not try to bite the man.

The “wild man” sat in the dirt mouthing gibberish while he fondled the snakes and threw one or two across the enclosure.  I stared at him for a while and he finally looked at me through the dirty stringy hair falling over his face.  I suddenly realized his eyes were as blue as mine and I sure had never seen a blue-eyed Negro.  I grinned at him and one of the blue eyes slowly closed in a wink while a faint smile flitted on his dirty face.  I laughed as I left the tent thinking that I sure did not want to make a living that way.

The fireworks after dark were the usual display of fire fountains, big Roman candles, skyrockets, and aerial bombs that left females covering their ears and dogs scurrying for cover.  One main attraction was the small hot air balloons.  These did not carry people and were only about three or four feet tall.  The balloon part was made of gaily colored Japanese rice paper and the “burner” was simply a large candle suspended on a small platform.

When the balloons were released and soared about the treetops, the candle flames lit up the paper and made a pretty sight as they drifted away in the warm night.  Since everything was dry as tinder in those drought days, I have no idea why those balloons did not start a major fire when they came down.

By the time the fireworks were done, so were we.  Dog tired from the long day and the excitement, a few stray firecrackers and a cap gun in our pockets, we would be bundled into the back seat of the Model T Ford touring car.  We children were usually fast asleep before we got to the Bona turnoff at Tarrytown.

Going to see a man about a horse

Buckskin

The first thing Dad needed when we moved onto that little forty-acre farm was a team of mules or horses.  As it turned out, he wound up with a more mismatched team than the mules Red and Old Blue that we had on the Doc Hunt place.  He scouted around and finally bought a team of horses from over near Greenfield, about twenty miles from Bona.  They made a dandy team.  One horse was a chunky sorrel gelding with a white blaze face.  He was well-muscled and was about the size of a quarter horse—great for riding—which we did bareback because we did not own a saddle.  The other horse was a dainty black mare not more than fourteen hands high.

They were both willing and made a good team but a problem developed the first time Dad started to plow with them.  It turned out that the mare had a bad shoulder.  After a few hours of plowing she was limping and her shoulder was swollen.  I do not know if the man who sold them knew about the shoulder, but when Dad called him he agreed to take back the mare.

To save the money for a truck, which he did not have, my father decided that I would ride the mare back to Greenfield while he went elsewhere to dicker for another horse.  He borrowed a Model T from one of our uncles because we did not have a car at the time.  He also borrowed a saddle for me to use for the twenty-mile trip to Greenfield.

I was tickled to death to get to ride the mare all that way by myself, and in a saddle instead of bareback.  I did not know that I was going to get so saddle-sore that I would have to eat my supper standing up.  I had hardly ever gotten to ride in a saddle.  Most always we just rode a mule to the fields with the harness on or else went bareback.  I figured it would be a great adventure to ride all that way.

Right after breakfast my mother packed me a lunch in my half gallon syrup pail school lunch bucket while Dad saddled the mare.  Her swollen shoulder had pretty well gone down overnight, but she still limped a little and Dad cautioned me to just ride her at a walk or slow trot.  He gave me directions how to get to the horse trader’s place and said that he would meet me there in the middle of the afternoon.

I sat grandly off down the road through Dadeville—a “cowboy” in faded blue bib overalls, clodhopper shoes (I figured you shouldn’t ride with bare feet in the stirrups of a saddle), blue hickory shirt, and a very battered and tattered straw sombrero on my tousled coppery hair over my round freckled face.  The work saddle was well worn, but the leather creaked satisfactorily.  In my active imagination the lame little black mare was a big stallion and I was the black-clad marshal of Tombstone galloping across the western range in a silver-ornamented saddle with a rifle scabbard and with six-guns strapped to my thighs.

Proceeding at the mare’s limping walk, we passed through Dadeville four miles south of Bona in about an hour.  I very rarely got more than two miles from home so it was indeed a big adventure to be in “strange country” and see some folks along the way that I did not know.

Another hour or so later I came to the ford across the Little Sac River.  As I mentioned before, a river ford is a shallow place where a river can be crossed when there is no bridge.  These days there is a high bridge over the Little Sac at that point and the road is straight and paved with black top.  In those days there was only a rocky dirt road that meandered down the bluff and across the river at a shallow place where rocks and gravel had been dumped to form an underwater roadbed.  The shallow riffle it formed was less than knee deep so that a horse or someone on foot did not have to swim.  Cars could be driven across, too, since automobiles were built much higher off the ground back then.  A modern car could not have made it.

I got off the mare at the ford and watered both her and me in the cool clear water of the small river.  I wasted some time piddling around with some crawdads and watching a couple of dragon flies hovering over the water, then rode on toward Tarrytown where the dirt country road would hit the paved highway between Greenfield and Springfield.  At the Tarrytown junction I decided that it must be time to stop and have lunch.  I did not own a watch, but the sun was high overhead by then and it was getting pretty warm.  I tied the mare in the shade of an oak tree, taking off her bridle so she could graze a little, and ate my lunch of biscuits and bacon.

After more than three hours in the saddle it was a relief to rest my behind.  I loafed a while and got to watching a tumble bug pushing his load across the road.

Tumble bugs are big black beetles almost the size of a man’s thumb.  They live on cow manure that they store in their burrows for the winter.

The way a tumble bug gets the manure (and also the name) is that they find a fairly fresh cowpile and make a ball of it about an inch in diameter.  The beetle then rolls the ball by standing on its front legs and tumbling the ball with its back legs in the direction it wants to go.  I do not know hw he knows what direction he is going since his head is down and he is going backwards.  I always intended to follow one sometime and see where he took the ball of cow manure, but a tumble bug moves pretty slow, what with getting the ball around rocks and stuff, so I always ran out of patience and quit watching.

The old tumble bug was pushing his ball along, leaving a little trail in the dust.  I watched him hit a piece of flat sandrock and moved that out of his way.  I might have stayed there longer except I heard a car in the distance and thought it might be my father.  I quick bridled the mare, got back into the saddle, and headed for Greenfield which was still nearly ten miles away.

My father came by in the Model T about the time I was in sight of the Greenfield water water—sticking up out of the green trees around this courthouse square.  Dad stopped the car and repeated his instructions as to how to find the farm that I was to take the mare to, then he headed on into town.

When I finally got there, I had been in that saddle for over five hours and I sure was glad to get off that horse.  My behind was sore, my legs were stiff and felt bowed even though I had ridden part of the time with a leg hooked over the saddle horn.

We put the saddle in the back of the Model T touring car.  As we left town, Dad said that he had found another horse over west of Bona toward Cane Hill and that we would go get it.  I sure groaned inwardly because I had had enough of the saddle for a while, but I did not say anything because it was something that had to be done.  Dad did say that it was only about three and a half miles from our house.

It was getting close to sunset when we got to the farm to get the new horse.  That horse proved to be something else when they led him out of the barn.  He was the biggest buckskin horse I ever saw—probably near eighteen hands tall.  He was big-muscled, had almost a roman nose, shaggy mane, and feet about the size of dinner plates at the end of his long legs.  Inevitably, his name was “Buck.”

Fortunately, Buck was a gentle old critter and we were to find that he was a joy to ride once you got up onto him.  In spite of those huge feet, he was a smooth-gaited pacer.  He never trotted, he paced—throwing those big feet out and plopping along the dusty road.  The ride was as smooth and easy as sitting in a rocking chair.  With all that size, when Buck galloped he really thundered down the road!

This time I was neither marshal of Tombstone, Hoot Gibson, or Tom Mix.  I was by then a very tired and hungry little country boy with a very sore backside.  It was nearly dark when I turned onto the road to Bona and, although I was perfectly accustomed to roaming familiar countryside in the dark, I was in strange territory for the first couple of miles.  The dark hallows that road dipped through seemed ominous as the last of the sun faded.

I was still about half a mile short of where the road crosses Maze Creek—the boundry of home territory—when I really spooked myself.  There was a very dark hollow ahead that got me to thinking about “The Legend of Sleepy Hallow” which I had recently read.  The more I thought about it, the more I imagined that the headless horseman might be riding up behind me.  I was looking back more than I was looking ahead and the hairs on the nape of my neck were prickling.

Just when I was at the bottom of that dark hollow, a screech owl cut loose in the brush nearby.  Now, if you have never heard a screech owl in a dark night, you have missed a very chilling sound.  A screech owl is very small, about the size of a man’s fist, but he can wake the dead.  He does not hoot like a respectable owl, but lets out a scream that could almost be a mountain lion or a banshee.  At least I think so, although I have never heard a banshee wail.

The scream of that little old screech owl did it.  I panicked, kicked that old buckskin in the ribs, slapped his withers with the end of the reins, and we went thundering up the road at a wild gallop.  There were a couple of people up ahead walking toward Bona in the darkness.  When that big old buckskin charged past, they took to the ditch!  Short as I was and hunched over the saddle horn, they probably thought I was the headless horseman!

We thundered across the wooden bridge over Maze Creek and I did not pull that horse up until we got up the hill to Bona and I turned him for home.  With a few familiar lights around me, I soon settled down and my heart quit pounding, but nothing in this world ever looked better to me than the soft yellow lamplight in the kitchen window at home.  The beans and macaroni that Mother had saved for me tasted wonderful—but I ate standing up at the kitchen counter.

Chapter 2 and Race Relations

Abandoned gas station in Greenfield, MO

Chapter 2

Moves, Watermelons, & Rabbit Traps

Vancouver, Washington, and Arcola, Missouri were only two of the seemingly endless series of moves while my father searched for a living for us.  The years between 1928 and 1933 are a bit hazy, but I know that we moved often enough that us kids sometimes went to two different schools during the same school year.

                After Arcola, I am not sure if we went to Kansas City and then to Greenfield or the other way around.  Doesn’t really matter I guess, but I know that in Greenfield Rex was still pretty small.  That was when Dad ran a small service station beside the highway that runs from Greenfield to South Greenfield, Lockwood and on to Lamar.

                We lived in a house that was attached to the service station, such as it was.  It was just two tall glass-topped gasoline pumps—one for low test and the other for high test ethyl.  The Model T Fords used the low test (regular) and Chevrolets, etc., used ethyl.  On the side of the house there was a little room for oil, grease, fan belts, and the like.

                It is at this point that my father’s memoir becomes uncomfortable for me and I found it necessary to consider options of dealing with the place and time in which he was raised and the use of the “n-word.”  Missouri was a border state during the Civil War. Brother fought against brother.  Jim Crow and segregation lasted well into the 20^th century.  Most Black families tended (and still do) to live in metropolitan centers, not rural Missouri.  Those who did are described as caricatures, not average people.  I fully support free speech and am four square against the banning of books.  Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn need to be viewed from the lens of the time in which they were written so I wondered if my father’s use of that word and his memories of two Black men who lived in his community ought to be so viewed.  The issue came up in the summer of 2013 when Paula Dean used the n-word conversationally.  I don’t believe that any white person using that term means anything good by it and she has nothing of the same excuse.  At best it is paternalistic.  At worst it is outright racist.  My father’s little sister responded to my outrage by reminding me that my father had had a Black babysitter, “N-George” and my father liked him fine.  That was just what everyone called him.  Everyone?  Now I am pretty sure that George had a last name; probably the surname of whatever master had owned his forbearers, but it seems that it is lost to history.  I am sure that no white in Dade county wondered if George minded being called the n-word.  They may have assumed that he wasn’t intelligent enough or felt enough self-worth to mind.  After all, he was just a Black man. 

                I cannot lay claim to a Black experience in America, but I do know what it is like to be the mother of a special needs child and hear the word “retard” bandied about.  It doesn’t matter what you MEAN by the use of a word.  What matters is how it makes the recipient feel.  As a high school employee I would admonish students for calling each other or a situation “retarded” and remind them of my beloved daughter.  “I didn’t mean anything bad by it,” would be the response to which I said, “You didn’t mean anything good either.”  Calling George N-George may not have been intended to be hurtful, but that does not excuse the nastiness that goes along with the use of the n-word.  It is time that Paula Dean and her ilk owned their behavior and put themselves in the place of those for whom that word was intended to keep marginalized.

It mortifies me to say it, but wonderful man that my father was in many ways, he was a racist. As I said, he was a product of the time and place he was raised.  Later, extensive travel broadened his mind on many things, but in his memoir he does not mince words in describing the “negroes” that were a part of his childhood or their station in an already poverty stricken community. I believe in the power of words.  Therefore, when quoting my father’s memoir I will use “N-George” to suit my sensibilities if not my father’s.

                In the yard at one side, Dad built a wooden grease rack.  It was just two ramps to get the cars off the ground so he could get underneath and change the oil.  He painted the rack red.

                One reason I remember that grease rack is because of an old negro handyman everyone called “N-George.”  No disrespect was intended—that was just George’s name.  Everyone liked the old man.  He was a wizened Black man with snow white hair who did odd jobs for folks around town.  He did not work in the fields for two reasons—he was too old and he was deathly afraid of snakes.  Even a little garter snake like I sometimes carried around in my pocket would send George up the nearest tree.

                Sometimes the younger men would tease old George by throwing a piece of rope down by him and yelling, “SNAKE!” just to see him jump.  I thought that was pretty mean of them.  N-George was as good hearted and, so far as I know, as honest as any man.  He was always kind and gentle with us kids.  Could be that he was a mite lazy, but it did not show much as no one in the Ozarks moved around very fast.

                Well, to get back to that grease rack, when my mother needed someone to mind two-year-old Rex while he played in the yard.  If Rex started to go out into the road George would say, “Now yo’ come back here, boy!  You wants me to take this here switch to yo’ britches?”  Then old George would turn to anyone nearby and with a twinkle in his ancient brown eyes say softly, “Y’all knows I wouldn’t lay a han’ on that boy for nuthin’ in this hyere worl’l.”

                There was another negro in Greenfield that us kids liked real well.  I do not remember his name, but he was the fat old boy who was the local barbecue cook.  For want of better, I’ll just call him “Sam” because that may well have been his name anyway.

                Near the filling station there was a vacant lot.  Once in a while Sam used a pit there to barbecue a big piece of meat—I suppose for some doings in Black town (yes, it was commonly known as “N-town”) which was not far away across the highway and the railroad track.  Us kids would go by there and pester Sam when the meat was almost done.  He would pretend to chase us away, but we would always wind up with a slice of the outside brown part between two slabs of white bread with barbecue sauce and mustard.

                I do not remember if the meat was pork or beef but, if there turns out to be manna in Heaven like the preachers say, it will probably not taste any better than Old Sam’s barbecue did then to hungry boys.  I can still visualize him standing there with a white apron over his fat stomach threatening us with a barbecue fork in one hand and handing us a sandwich with the other.