Heading West

I did not attend the auction at our little farm.  I had no desire to watch our meager and somewhat shabby but familiar possessions dispersed to strangers.  I had said my goodbyes to old Buck, that patient and gentle big buckskin horse, and to Red, the little blazed- face sorrel.  They had served us well and were my friends.

Mother had told me that I could keep one of our two guns—either the slim little twenty-two or the single-barreled breech loader shotgun—for hunting that fall.  I chose the shotgun.  I had only been permitted to carry a shotgun for the past year and some bird hunting wa all that it was likely to do in the fall.  I would be leaving in the spring before squirrel season.

Mother also asked me not to plague Grandpa and Grandma with a dog so, very reluctantly and having to hold back tears, I said goodbye to my good friend Pup and gave him to one of my cousins who I was sure would treat him well and take care of him.

On the day of the sale on a Saturday I simply helped Grandpa around the store and carried buckets of water from the well for Grandma.  I do not know how much money was realized, but hopefully it was sufficient to defray Mother’s expenses on the long trip west.

Departure day for Mother, Richard, Rex, and tiny seven-month-old Sandra arrived.  Mr. Ganaway loaded our old metal trunk and such housewares as mother could take into the truck, then he piled bedding and pillows on top so that Richard and Rex would have room to sit up under the canopy.  There was even a small space for them to hang their feet down at the back.  Mr. Ganaway said, “Well, boys, you won’t see where we are going, but you will sure know where we have been!”  It promised to be a long, long haul on those miles across Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Washington.

Our family was never very demonstrative.  My mother’s eyes puddled up a bit when she told Grandma and Grandpa goodbye.  She hugged me and admonished me to write a letter once in a while.  She turned then and climbed into the truck while Richard and Rex scrambled into the back.  Grandma reluctantly handed up Sandra Dean.  I patted Sandra’s tiny hand, then closed the door as the truck engine growled into life.  They pulled away and off down the graveled road toward Dadeville and the highway west beyond.

The last I saw was Richard and Rex waving gaily from the back of the truck until the dust obscured them.  I stood in the road and watched them disappear past the little house where we had lived, then I had to hurry off to school.

Saints and Sinners

Vintage blacksmith in Bakerville BC.  Bona blacksmith shop is gone.

Over beyond Mattie Whiteside’s store to the south, there once was a blacksmith shop run by the Slagle brothers.  I well remember the ring of the sledge on the anvil and the odor and sound of the forge when they heated horseshoes or plowshares.  The Slagle boys shod horses and mules and repaired the steel rims of the horse drawn wooden-wheeled farm wagon until such wagons were replaced with wagons made from old Model T Ford frames and had rubber tires.  By the early thirties the blacksmith shop was not making a living for them and it was abandoned.  I recall that in the mid-thirties the Slagle brothers for a while operated a small, open air sawmill down by the frog pond west of Grandpa’s store.  It was belt driven from an old, old steam tractor.

I recall one incident involving that old blacksmith shop.  It was 1930 or 1931 when I was nine or ten years old.  We were visiting Grandpa and Grandma one sunny afternoon and I had been at the shop watching Ben Slagle heat some horse shoes in the forge and fit them to a black horse.  There was a group of men in a storeroom at the back of the dilapidated building taking turns sipping out of a quart fruit-jar of moonshine whiskey.

1930s still

Since Bona has sometimes been called “the buckle on the Bible belt” there were not many moonshine stills in the hollows around there except for a couple that us kids stumbled across down in the cane brakes along Maze Creek.  Moonshine was easy to come by during Prohibition, however.  The men who took a nip or three now and then knew where there was an old hallow log down by the Little Sac River where they could leave a dollar bill, go fishing for a while, then come back and that dollar bill would have turned into a quart of “white lightening.”

Well, on this particular day, I do not know who all was back there as we kids were not allowed in the storeroom, but I do know that Eulas Todd was one of them and, with Eulas, one drink led to another.  I had gone back across the road to Grandpa’s store when I heard Maud Todd yelling her head off out in the road.  Now Maud was a small lady with jet black hair and a mighty temper.  She was really on the warpath.

I went outside, along with everyone else in earshot—which was a fair piece when Maud yelled—and she was stomping up and down by a black Model T roadster that had been parked in front of the blacksmith shop, yelling things like, “Look at that drunken bum!  He has passed out right here in front of God and everybody!  Come here, you kids, and just see what drinking that Devil’s brew will do to you!”

She saw me and motioned, “Come on over here, Conrad, and look at this shameful sight.  He has plat passed out!”

I tiptoed rather timorously across the road and looked in the open door of the car.  There was Eulas, all right, sprawled out across the seat dead to the world.  He did not even stir when Maud shook him and beat on his leg with a clenched fist, mad as an old wet hen.  Some spittle was drooling from one corner of his mouth and I would have thought that he was dead except that he kept on snoring.

I don’t reckon Eulas really went to hell because of his drinking, though.  He was really a good and gentle man with his kids when he was sober and I remember he taught Claude to play “Greencorn” on the banjo one time when Claude had broken a foot and was laid up with nothing to do.  Eulas never went near the church in those days, but I heard years later that he had quit carousing around, got religion, and joined the Bona Church.  He never hurt anybody that I know of and I’d reckon he made his peace with the Lord before he died at a ripe old age.

Contemporary picture of the Church at Bona

Bona Church deserves a special mention since it was—and still is—the hub of the community.  It was a white clapboard square building (since then modified by the addition of a brick front) shaded by several large spreading trees—mostly maple, but one was a big mulberry tree.  The church is a very fundamentalist Church of Christ.  The members do not hold with drinking, card playing, dancing, etc, and no musical instruments (except for the song-leader’s tuning fork) are allowed in the church.

There were no regular ministers at the Bona Church.  Services were conducted by the deacons and elders of the church except when traveling ministers came to hold revival meetings.  I would reckon they were latter-day circuit riders although they came in either Model T or Model A Ford cars instead of riding on horses.

I recall two of those traveling ministers in particular because they were so different.  There was one short and stocky red-headed man who was an old-time hellfire and damnation preachers.  When he got going good, he would wave his arms as he paced back and forth behind the lectern and his sonorous voice would fair make the acetylene light fixtures shake.  When he thundered about the sins that would take you straight to hell, he could make you cringe in your seat while you smelled Sulphur fumes and imagined the devil with his pitchfork hot on your trail.

The other preacher I recall was just the reverse.  I do not recall the names but this other fellow was tall and lanky as if he were not eating to regularly and, instead of being bombastic about sinning, he was soft-spoken, kind, and gentle.  He based his sermons on the good things in the Bible and a promise of a good life to come with Jesus—providing, of course, that you led a good life and avoided the well-marked path to perdition.  He was very persuasive, too.  At the end of an evening revival meeting when the invitation hymn was being sung, he made folks sincerely want to come forward and pledge their lives to the Lord.  He was the one that baptized me, but that was later on.

There was no choir at the Bona Church.  The congregation was the choir.  Every Sunday evening many of the congregation gathered for “singing” which served as choir practice as well as a vesper service in praise of the Lord.  It is my regret that tape recorders did not exist then because, in their small way, the Bona congregation could rival the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.  Led by lanky Elmer Long, as long as they stuck to the old favorites—“The Old Rugged Cross,” “In the Garden,” “Shall We Gather at the River,” “Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown,” etc—everyone knew the tenor, bass, alto, and soprano parts and it sounded beautiful.  I shall always remember walking up the road toward Bona on a warm summer Sunday evening and hearing that music pour from the open windows along with the soft golden glow of the acetylene lights.  I do not know if they still sing that well or not since I have not been in the Bona Church for services for more than thirty years.

In 1970 I drove my grandparents home to Greenfield from a winter on Whidbey Island in the 1959 Chevrolet Impala my grandfather had bought.  I hadn’t been in Missouri since I was too young to remember.  My trip happened to coincide with Aunt Ora’s funeral which was at the Church at Bona.  My grandmother explained ahead that there wouldn’t be a piano or organ or a choir, but there were two pews of old folks who may have at one time sounded angelic to my father.  I couldn’t help but think that a piano or organ would have done a lot to keep us all in tune.

Chapter 3: Back to Bona

Chapter 3

More Moves and a Feud 

The crops did not amount to much that year on Doc Hunt’s place as the big drought of the thirties was getting underway and Hard Times were in full swing.  My father put his seed corn and his hopes into that worked-out red Ozark soil, but neither came to much.  He gave up renting and went back to tenant farming in 1931 or thereabouts.

This time we moved into a big yellow farmhouse about a mile south of Bona and a quarter of a mile off the road to Dadeville.  In all of our moves in those days we kept getting a little closer to that little store was there, is why I feel that Bona (such as it is) is my home town. [village would be a better term]

That yellow house was up a long rocky lane from the county road.  At that time the county road was just a rocky dirt country road.  There were no bridges over Maze Creek, halfway to Dadeville, or over the Little Sac River, south of Dadeville near Tarrytown.  In either wagon or car, it was necessary to ford the streams where rocks and gravel had been filled in to make a shallow riffle for the road to cross.

Richard and I were old enough by then to ramble around the countryside exploring and we really began to appreciate the beauty and peace of those Ozark hills.  It is an area of gently rolling hills, extensive green woodlands, creeks, and river.  There are no mountains in southwest Missouri.  The “Ozark Mountains” that you hear about—really just overgrown steep hills with lots of woodlands and deep ravines—are mostly in southeast Missouri and down into Arkansas.

I don’t like my father’s term “overgrown’ hills.  As an adjective, it is the opposite of what is happening to the Ozarks Mountains.  What Uncle Dick told me, and I believe him, is that the reason the Missouri Ozarks Mountains, particularly those in the area our family is from, are the oldest mountains in the world.  Some people believe that the Appalachians (where our family passed through) are the oldest, but they are taller than the Ozarks. Like old people, the Ozarks have become worn and stooped from the millenniums of years since their birth, but their spirit is strong, but by 1931 the soil was worn out.  When I am there I can feel the ancientness.  Whatever those mountains may seem to suffer when compared to our Cascades or the Himalayas they make up for in spirit.  Too, whoo whoo for you?  Go there.

Those Ozark hills, however, were a veritable wonderland to us.  The deep woods—interspersed with cornfields, grain fields (wheat and oats), and open pastures—were mostly deciduous trees that were thick-leaved and shady in summer and bare in winter.  There was little underbrush in those woodlands so we could roam freely through them.

Fox Squirrel

The hills at that time abounded with small game.  Besides the many cottontail rabbits, grey squirrels and fox squirrels, there were quail and ducks in the fall.  There were more song birds than I can count: mocking birds, whippoorwills, cardinals, scarlet blackbirds, and many many sparrows.  There were many crows and (as scavengers to keep the countryside clean of carrion) turkey buzzards that wheeled silently in the blue sky.

We had plenty of catfish in the rivers and creeks as well as perch, bluegills, and chubs so us kids grew up with a fishing line and cork bobber in our back pockets.  It seemed that we always had new territory to explore and yet, in retrospect, I realize that our real world lay within a circle around Bona of about four miles in diameter.  Anything outside that was alien territory and any person—other than relatives—from outside was a “stranger” upon whom we looked with a bit of suspicion.

In the halcyon days of roaming those hills and woodlands, squirrel rifle in hand and fishing line in pocket, we came to know that home territory so intimately that we could find our way unerringly home even on moonless nights with only the familiar star constellations to guide us.

No matter where they roamed, the stars always seemed to guide members of the family back to Dade County.

The Great Depression Comes

We moved back to the country when the Big Depression hit at the close of the Twenties.  Dad got laid off at the Fisher Body plant and could not find another job in Kansas City so he headed back to the hills to try farming again.  With no money to invest in land and equipment, the best my father could do at the time was to go to work for someone else as a tenant farmer.  It was back to the outhouse, the kerosene lamps, and splitting and carrying wood for the stoves—not to speak of baths in that washtub by the cookstove.

We lived on about five different farms between 1930 and ‘33 or ‘34.  One, I believe the first after Kansas City, was a small farm a couple miles out of Greenfield, that belonged to a man named Earl Wilson.  I remember Wilson lived in a big yellow house right on the edge of Greenfield.  From the three-room little farm house where we lived, us kids walked down a dirt road quite a way to another one-room country schoolhouse.  It needed paint so bad that it was just a weathered grey sitting under spreading oak trees.

One reason I remember that dirt road is that at the foot of the hill from our house a branch (a stream too small to call a creek) ran under the road through a culvert.  Just below the culvert there was a pool where Richard and I taught ourselves to swim.  At least we dogpaddled around in it.  The pool in that branch seemed like a pretty good swimming hole to us little boys, but I was back there fifty years later [I was with him] and went by to look at it.  The branch must have shrunk or something because that “swimming hole” seemed hardly big enough to water a couple of cows!

We did not stay long at the Earl Wilson place.  I am sure that my father was not at all happy working as a hired hand.  He found a fair-sized farm a few miles north of Bona near Fair Play, Missouri.  It belonged to a doctor named Hunt so we always called it “the Doc Hunt place.”  It had a small weathered farmhouse, smokehouse, well with a cast-iron pump in the yard, chicken house, and outhouse.  The grey weathered sprawling barn was pretty old, but my father made it do for the mismatched team of myules he got and for several milk cows.

Doc Hunt place circa 1952

While we lived on the Doc Hunt place I was about nine and Richard was eleven so we could start helping out around the place with chores.  We fed the chickens, split and carried wood, and sometimes helped with the milking.  I do not recall ever having been taught to milk a cow.  It seems like farm kids just know how to do things like that can be a mystery to city kids.  I guess we were getting practical lessons from Dad every day without ever realizing it.  We had a good tutor, too—Dad was a hard worker and he knew everything that needed doing around a farm.

Doc Hunt place circa 1952

One time it was a good thing that Richard and I knew how to milk.  Dad and Mother had taken Rex and gone in our old Model T to Bona, Greenfield, Bolivar, or somewhere.  They were not yet back when we got home from school—another one-room country school, Shady Grove, that we walked a mile and a half to get to. We knew exactly what to do about the evening chores so pretty soon we had everything done except the milking.  The problem with that was that Dad had been selling milk and we had about twenty cows that were demanding to be milked as the sun went down.  That is one whale of a lot of teats (eighty to be exact) to squeeze by hand!

When the sun was nearing the horizon, Richard and I knew those cows had to be milked so we got the buckets and a milk can and started.  When it got dark, we lit a kerosene lantern and kept at it.  Our small hand and arms got dog tired, but we stayed with it and were just finishing stripping the last two cows when the Model T finally pulled in.  I think they maybe had a flat tire or something that had delayed them in town.

Dad, who had been figuring that he would have to malk all those cows in the dark, was real proud of us for getting everything done and he said so.  That made us proud, too, but it was sort of embarrassing because usually he did not say much when were were right, but boy he sure let us know when we did wrong!  I guess that is how us boys grew up with the philosophy that a fellow does not need a bunch of praise for just doing what he is supposed to do.  Praise only came when you did something really outstanding—like two little boys getting all those cows milked.

Fair Play Store as it might have looked during the '20s & '30s

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.

First Grade at Five

In this piece of my father's memoir he discusses life when they retuned to Missouri and their family.  While they may seem to be irrelevant, there is plenty of evidence that birth order can have much to do with the development of character and events later in life.

My father got back from Washington in the late summer of 1927.  He had scraped together enough money to buy a topless 1924 Model T Ford.  He drove that old car back to the Ozarks using almost all the money had had left for gasoline.  He had to sleep in the car and I guess he ate a lot of canned pork and beans and maybe a sandwich occasionally.  He drove into Bona with nothing byut that old car and one crumpled five-dollar bill in his pocket.  The prospects did not seem too good for our little family, but Dad was nothing if not a survivor and he was not afraid of hard work.

                Not long after he got back, Dad was sitting on the porch of Grandpa’s store one afternoon and someone came along and told him that a man over in Arcola, about seven miles west of Bona, was looking for a helper in his automobile service garage.  Ad was good with his hands (that was long before they got gnarled from shucking corn and, much later, from pulling laundry in a hospital) and he was quick to learn anthing mechanical.  He got the job in Arcola and rented a little three-room house for us.  I remember that before we could move into it he had to buy some poison candles and fumigate the house to get rid of the bedbugs.

Abandoned store in Arcola, MO

                Arcola, Missouri, was a little bit bigger than Bona and seemed like a real town to us kids.  There was a general store, café, the garage, feed and hardware stores, and a nice brick schoolhouse.  There were several houses but probably not more than ten or twelve.  The little house Dad rented was on a half-acre of land and had a small barn and smokehouse.

                Although I was still not yet six years old, there were some memorable events for me while we lived in Arcola.  In exploring our new home, Richard and I found an old flintlock or musket either up in the attic or out in the smokehouse.  My father let us play with it after he made sure that it had no powder or flint.

                Being resourceful little devils, the first thing we did while Dad was at work at the garage and Mother was busy, was to swipe one of Dad’s shotgun shells.  We cut it open and poured the powder into the barrel of that old musket using a wad of paper to hold it in place.  The mustket was far too heavy for one of us to hold so we were going to prop it on the barbed wire fence along the barnlot and shoot it at the barn.  We were going to try to set it off with a kitchen match but before we got around to it Dad found out and took the musket away from us.

                I got another lesson I never forgot while we lived there in Arcola.  Richard and I were standing by the road one afternoon when we saw a green Chevrolet coupe coming at a pretty fair clip.  I do not remember whose idea it was, but we pegged a couple of small rocks to see if we could hit a moving target.  One of the stones did hit the side of the car.  It was only a little rock but it made a racket.  The man driving promptly skidded to a stop and backed up.

                We were both scared stiff and just stood there when the man got out of the car.  We figured he would whip us or something, but it turned out that he was a wise and gentle man.  He just knelt down and talked to us quietly.  He explained why we should not throw rocks—that we might break a window and maybe hurt him.  He did not even take us home to our mother.  He just got back into the car and drove off while we stood there feeling bad about what we had done.  After that we only threw rocks at things like fence posts, rabbits, or sometimes at each other.

                (I remembered that lesson about 25 years later when I was living in Seattle.  Coming home from work late one evening after a snow storm, a small boy pegged a snowball at my car and scored a hit on the side window.  He had a pretty good arm for a little shaver.  The window did not break, but I suddenly thought about that time in Arcola so I stopped and ran the kid down where he had hidden behind a bush at the side of the house. I knelt down in the snow and had a little talk with him.  It did not work too well.  As I drove away he whanged the back of the car with another snowball.)

                Arcola is where I started to school.  I would not be six until the following March and there was no kindergarten in those days, but when it came time for Richard to start school in the fall I begged and pleaded with my mother to let me go to school.  I knew my ABCs, could read simple stuff, and could add and subtract numbers up to a hundred.  I guess my constant nagging wore my mother down as she went to the school and talked to the grade school teacher, Miss Emma Lou Maphies.  Miss Maphies and the school let me start in the first grade and that is how I wound up only one grade behind Richard.

                They told me that I could be in the first grade if I could keep up.  I was flat out determined to do that because—even thought he was nearly two years older—I figured that, by gum, if Richard could do it, I could too—and I did.  My report card (preserved by my mother) shows that I got pretty good grades the first three quarters and a Satisfactory-plus in deportment.  I was absent only four days that first year.  I believe that was when I developed a very sore throat and the doctor said it was diphtheria.  They gave me a diphtheria shot and I was back in school the following week.

                I have always felt that being a second son was an advantage in the long run.  It was very frustrating at times because Richard was always lording it over me, pooh-poohing me, and I usually got the dirty end of the stick from him all the time we were growing up.  I was close enough to him in age, however, that I was determined to keep up and maybe do a little better now and again.

                It kept me humping because old Richard was pretty smart and usually at the top of his class.  He always thought that being older made him smarter than me, but starting when I was five I was determined to prove that it was not so.  The result was that I stayed pretty much at the top of my class and that was to be an advantage in later years.

                Our little brother Rex Donald was the unlucky one of us three boys.  He was four years younger than me; consequently, he could never keep up with us.  He was just little brother tagging along or else getting left out.  In a way I believe that Rex never thought he measured up to us, even when he became a successful businessman, father, and grandfather.

                Physically, Rex and I were the ones who were similar.  Richard was dark-haired like our father and he was always a lean string bean.  (We told him that if he went outside in red long johns people would mistake him for a thermometer.)  Both Rex and I were sandy-haired and stocky like our Dutch forbearers and had we been a bit closer in age we might have been mistaken for twins at times. [I was about a year old when my mother flew from Wichita, KS to Portland, OR so our Vancouver family could see me.  I mistook Uncle Rex for my daddy, hugging his neck and calling him daddy.  As the father of two little boys, I think something about that endeared me to him and our relationship was cemented for a long, long time.  He remained special to me for the rest of his life.]

                I guess Rex’s best friends when he was small were baby chicks, kittens, puppies, or whatever stray little animals he came across.  He was a tender-hearted fellow and that heart was pure gold.  Smart, too, but he did not capitalize on it, I believe because he just did not think he could keep up with or equal the achievements of his older brothers.  I have always felt bad about that.  He could have been at the top of his class, too, but I believe he felt that he was always in our shadows.

The Spit and Whittle Club

"When you reach my age, your mind tends to ramble a bit once in a while."

Some of the store loafers were real whittlers.  The lazier ones would just whittle on a stick and make shavings on the dark oiled wood floor, but some of them would make things.  Once in a while someone would patiently whittle a wooden chain if he could find a stick big enough.  I tried whittling a chain once but I never could get beyond the second link before I broke it.

                One old fellow who was a regular started whittling a chain out of a piece of wood about three feet long one fall.  He was pretty good, but he did not work very hard at it or very fast because talking interfered and he was a pretty good talker on almost any subject.  He worked all winter on that chain and only got about five links done before he broke one and tossed the whole thing into the stove sometime around New Year’s Eve.

When Grandpa Stanley retired, his store building was sold and moved across the road to be attached to Tom Humbert's store.  Today it is abandoned.

                Another old fellow would split off a stick of pine about as wide as your little finger and sit there whittling grains of corn.  He was pretty good at it and talking did not slow him down to speak of.  Around where he sat, by the end of the evening, it would look like someone had scattered shelled white corn in a chicken yard even though they were a little hard to see among all the shavings.  I think the purpose of most whittling was just to make shavings.

                Mostly those store loafers were hill farmers who did not have much to do in winter after dark.  Grandpa’s store was a good place to while away some time and talk.  There was not much else to do since most of them had all the kids they wanted and possum hunting was not very good late fall.  Very few people had radios and, of course, no one had even heard of television.  The nearest moving picture show was in Greenfield.  It only showed silent films and nobody went very often back then in Hard Times when most of the time a man did not have two dimes to rub together in the pocket of his bib overalls.

                One attraction of Grandpa’s store on long dark winter evenings was that, in the 1930s, he had the only electricity in North Morgan township.  The nearest electric line was at Tarrytown around ten miles away where our dirt road intersected the paved highway between Greenfield and Springfield.  Everyone except Grandpa and Grandma used coal oil lamps and lanterns or maybe a Coleman gasoline mantle lantern.  Everyone except the Bona Church, that is.  The church had a carbide light system.  There was a carbide gas generator out back and the gas was piped to light fixtures in the church.  It gave a nice soft yellow light, too.  It was plenty for reading the songbook at Sunday night “singing.”

                It was in the late ‘20s or early ‘30s that Grandpa got tired of fiddling with coal oil or gasoline lights in the store and house.  He installed a 32 volt Delco system.  He built a corrugated iron shed back of the feed storage shed behind the store and installed a big bank of batteries and a generator operated by a little gasoline engine about like a lawn mower engine.  Every couple of days when the batteries got low, he would fire up the little putt-putt engine and charge them back up.  I guess folks thought Charley Stanley was well off and kind of uppity—neither of which was true.

                Of course I don’t remember all this stuff about Grandpa’s store and the loafers just from when I was five years old, but from all the time I was growing up back there.  Just thought I would tell you about it while it came to mind.  When you reach my age [69 at the time of writing] your mind tends to ramble a bit once in a while.

Grandpa's Store

My father had a phenomenal memory.  It wasn't photographic the way Uncle Dick's was, but he remembered sounds and smells and emotions from his entire life, from claiming to remember being born to every minute of December 7th 1941.  And he wrote it all down.  His memoire could easily be two books, his childhood in the Missouri Ozarks and the WWII and Boeing years; each unique and attractive to different audiences.  It may well be that I divide it thus, but for now, as I put it into a form that may or may not be saleable, I am including his childhood with all his description because it directly influenced events that still lay in the future as he fished, hunted, and, yes, walked miles--sometimes carrying his little brother--to a one room school which he reminded me of occasionally when I complained of the six blocks I had to walk.  My father's memories of a childhood in the Ozarks is of a way of life largely vanished.  I think it is worth preserving.

Original drawing of Grandpa Stanley's store in Bona, MO done by the author in the late 1930s and the basis of a painting done in 1967

The buildings in Bona were shaded by many large trees.  The churchyard in particular had several large maple trees and one huge mulberry between the church and the Todd house.

                Grandpa’s store was a low one-story frame building.  By the side of the dirt road in the edge of the churchyard was the community well from where Grandpa and Grandma had to carry water in buckets.  The town well did not have a pump.  Instead there was a slender well bucket that was let down to the water on a rope over a pulley.  Back in those hills we just did not have much in the way of modern conveniences.

                The front of the store was a concrete porch shaded by a slanted corrugated tin roof.  There were two gasoline pumps at the corner of the porch.  On the store porch there was always a row of empty milk cans that made a handy place for loafers to sit in the summer when it was warm.  In the winter or when it was raining, which it did not do very often back in the days of the great drought, the loafers would sit in the back of the store by the big black pot-bellied coal stove.

                Entering the store through a creaking screen door, you were immediately assailed by a deliciouis mélange of scents.  It was compounded of the heady aromas of tobacco, dried beans, leather, flour, candy, cookies, oil from the compound with which Grandpa swept the wood floor, and so on—even including the scent of the glue on the sticky strips of flypaper that hung at intervals throughout the store.

                That store had everything country folks might need or want crammed into a space that was about forty by sixty feet.  As you came in the front door there was a glass candy case to the left and beyond that a tobacco case with all sorts of smoking and chewing tobacco.  Twists of chewing tobacco hung from the low ceiling above the case and flat tins of snooze, sacks of Bull Durham and Golden Grain, and myriad other items were on the shelves beyond the aisle behind the cases.

                Across from the candy and tobacco cases, fronted by the red Coca Cola cooler, was a long rack of shelves holding a variety of canned goods.  I was particularly fond of the canned Vienna sausages, canned salmon, and the canned oysters that my mother got when she could afford them to make oyster stew. [Having been raised in Missouri herself, as were her parents before her, I have no idea where my grandmother got a taste for or recipe for oyster stew.  Hers were the only oysters I would eat, but by then the family lived in oyster country.]

                At the rear of the store, on the left beyond the patent medicines, was the counter where orders were made up.  It had a big roll of brown wrapping paper on a rack at the end just over the flour barrel and, next to that, a Toledo “Honest Weight” counter scales.  Immediately below were the brown paper bags that Grandpa would snap open with a flourish when he was bagging beans or something for a customer.  Also right under the order counter were bins and kegs of loose product (we call them bulk food foods today) like pinto or navy beans, coffee beans, cornmeal, and I do not remember what all else—each with its special fragrance.

                On the other side of the store to the front was the drygoods section.  There were stacks of blue hickory work shirts and either blue or blue and white striped bib overalls.  There were shelves of bolts or cotton prints for women to use for dresses, aprons, and poke sunbonnets.  There were shoes which were mostly work shoe clodhoppers and a few Sunday oxfords.  When folks wanted fancier clothes and could afford them, they went either to Greenfield, the county sea, twenty miles away to Rubenstien’s or else to Springfield which was about forty miles away.

                Back beyond the clothing and drygoods was the hardware section.  The walls back there were hung with horse and mule collars.  There were always piles of plow points on the floor alongside kegs of horseshoes and horseshoe nails.  There were sledge hammers, axes, all kinds of ash and hickory tool handles, doubletree clevises, singletrees, and all the other stuff that is inclined to break or wear out around a farm.  Most of those things can be found only in museums now.

                The real heart of Grandpa’s store was at the rear of the main part.  That was where the big black pot-bellied cast iron heating stove sat.  Loafers would gather around that coal-fired stove to whittle and talk when it was too cold to sit out on the store porch and do those things.  Grandpa had a place rigged at the end of the canned goods counter near the stove where he nailed together egg cases of white pine while he talked with the loafers.

                By the wall near the stove there was a Toledo floor scales where the live chickens and cans of cream brought in to be traded were weighed.  Just beyond in the corner was a little room that had the coal oil tank and where eggs were candled to see if they were fresh.

                Opposite that little room there was a small glassed-in room that Grandpa had built where he tested the cream for butterfat content.  On the wall beyond the stove by the back door was a big old Regulator pendulum clock tick-tocking away.  That Regulator clock was supposed to also tell the phases of the moon, too, but I don’t believe that part worked.  That did not matter though, as everyone could see the moon and always knew the phase it was in.

                That big old pot-bellied stove was a delight on the cold winter nights.  Loafers would sit around on wooden cases, cream can, or whatever else might be handy including the floor.  In between spitting tobacco juice into the stove they would whittle and talk.  Some of the tales they would tell were downright mind-boggling for a little boy.

                Of course, when I was there, I knew to sit back and be quiet.  In those days children were to be seen but not heard.  We would not dare to intrude in an adult conversation when they were talking about such important things as Politics, Old Times, or whether there is life in the Hereafter.  We kids just listened and if they were not talking about something interesting like Old Times or ghost stories we could always go somewhere else and play.

                I remember two sounds about Grandpa’s store besides the talking of the loafers.  One was the tick-tocking of that Regulator clock and the other was the tap, tap-tap of Grandpa’s all little metal hammer he used to nail new egg cases together.  He had to make a lot of them as the eggs remained in the cases when he took them every week to market in Springfield.  He bought the white pine parts already cut to size and kept a supply of them down in the barn behind the house.

                That straight grain soft pine was just dandy for whittling.  Pieces of it were what the loafers used there around the stove.  After I got big enough to carry my own pocket knife, I whittled lots of boats, airplanes and wooden guns that we made to shoot innertube rubber bands at each other out of the white pine.

Bona, Missouri

My father's description of Bona (pronounced Bonnie) reminds me of Harper Lee's description of the fictional Macomb, Alabama except that Bona would have made Macomb look like a metropolis. 

After about two years in Vancouver just off-bearing lumber at the sawmill, Dad was not getting ahead much and being a very independent type he was sick of working for wages.  He was probably tired of the winter rains, too, and I am sure that both he and Mother were homesick for the Ozark hills. Except for missing Grandma and Grandpa Stanley, our maternal grandparents, and some pieces of candy corn or a box of Crackerjacks from the store Grandpa had in Bona (and Grandpa sent us those in a package in the mail sometimes) I guess Richard and I did not care much was we could always find plenty of things to do wherever we were. 

                Anyhow, in 1927 when I was five years old, Dad scraped together enough money to buy coach tickets on the train for Mother and we three boys and he sent us off to Missouri.  He apparently had to stay and work until he had enough to get himself back there.

                I remember a few things about that trip back to the Ozarks on the train.  The train coach had green plush seat.  Mother had bought Richard and me each a little notebook to scribble and draw in and she got each of us a new little toy car.  We would run those cars along the back of the seats and sometimes we sent them scooting down the aisle.

                Mother did not have enough money to take us to the dining car to eat so she would get us sandwiches either from a train vendor or from the stations when the train stopped for a little while.  At one such stop somewhere, she left baby Rex with a fellow passenger and got off the train to get some baloney and bread for us to eat.  While she was gone they were switching cars on the train and the one we were in suddenly moved a little way.

                I had watched from the window while my mother got off and when the car moved I thought they were going to leave her behind.  It was traumatic—I panicked and started running down the aisle crying and yelling, “Don’t leave my Mama! DON’T LEAVE MY MAMA!!”  It was a great relief when she got back on safely with the bread and baloney and I felt very foolish for having made such a scene.

                I do not remember much about our arrival back in Bona except I sure was glad to see Grandpa and Grandma Stanley.  Their house was right alongside Grandpa’s general store, separated only by a small front yard.  “C. B. Stanley, General Merchandise” it said in gold lettering on the front window of the store—and that store was a wonderland for little boys.  There were many treats in the candy case, the rack of cookie boxes, and the red Coca Cola cooler were Grandpa kept bottles of Coca Cola, Dr. Pepper, and all flavors of NeHi pop on ice.

                Grandma and Grandpa Stanley lived in Bona, Missouri, which was truly a backwoods crossroads village.  Bona was at the top of a hill on the road from Dadeville to Fairplay in the North Morgan township of Dade County.  The east-west crossroad went from Aldrich, seven miles to the east, through Bona to Cane Hill and over to Arcola.

                Grandpa’s house and store occupied the northwest corner of the crossroad.  The southwest corner was the churchyard of the white wood-framed Bona Church [and where Uncle Dick, his daughter Janice, my son Frank, I scattered my father’s ashes in 2002].  The northeast corner was, in the late ‘20s when we came back from Washington, a vacant lot that had only a hitching rack used by buggies and wagons coming to trade at the store or, on Sunday, coming to church.

                The southeast corner of the crossroad was occupied by the second store in bona, Whiteside’s Store.  Actually it did not amount to much compared to Grandpa’s “General Merchandise.”  Next to Mattie Whiteside’s store there was in those days a blacksmith shop operated by the Slagle brothers.

                There were maybe six other houses and buildings in Bona in those days.  South of the blacksmith shop there were two small houses.  Across from those and south of the tree-shaded church yard, there was a board and batten house where our cousins Claude and Billy Todd lived.  Just beyond it there was a little building that Eulas Todd, Claude and Billy’s father, called the Bona “garage,” but I never saw him working on a car there.

                West of the crossroad there was not much except just down the hill from the churchyard there was another board and batten house where Cook Neil and his family lived.  Across from that and west of Grandpa’s barn there was a frog pond.

                Just north of Grandpa’s house there was a large white two-story house called the Welly Depee house.  Old Welly Depee was a crippled old man who made brooms for a living.  He had a small shack out behind Grandma’s flower garden that was his workshop where he made the brooms.

                Down the hill to the east there were only a couple of house, both of which were occupied by what was left of the Whiteside family.  In the first lived Mattie Whiteside’s daughter and her family and beyond, in the second, was where Mattie and her illegitimate grandson Frank lived.

                Dade County, Missouri where Bona was [there is little left of it, save the church and one or two houses in the 21^st century] located on the edge of the “Ozark Mountain;” however, there are no mountains around.  There the Ozarks consist of gently rolling hills that are tree covered except where they have been cleared for pasture, cornfields, or other crops.