Well, the Great Depression was not something we would want to live through again, but all in all it wasn't so bad. We were broke, but then, so were our neighbors. We had plenty to eat and wear—and we had each other. The lean years seemed to bring us even closer together; we had to stay together, we didn't have enough money to go our separate ways. And of course we had our children.
Dennis was ten and Anita was eight when Larry became one of the family in 1942. And then when he was six weeks old, the little tyke almost left us for good. He was one sick little baby. We took him to a chiropractor who gave him adjustments and told us to feed him goat's milk. I drove all over the country looking for a goat that was giving milk. After finding one I kept looking for more goats that would be giving milk after the first one stopped. It took awhile, but then I found a man with a whole herd of goats. He didn't need them because he was going to war, so we bought all twelve of them.
When we sold out a year later and went to California to get into war work, we bought goat's milk on the way out there and for eight months after we got there. In El Paso we bought milk from a man who owned a herd of registered goats. He sold goats for as much as $80 each. The ones we had at Royston were of the $4 variety. I was glad the El Paso milk wasn't registered; we couldn't have afforded it.
Bill Carriker, a neighbor at Royston, said Larry was sure going to be mad when he grew up and learned that his mama had been a goat.
When our two oldest kids were little bitty kids, and we had this two-holer off down there under the shade of a mesquite tree, Ima said to me one day, "I wish you would go down there and peep and see what those kids are doing. They've been in there a long time. No telling what they're doing in there."
I peeped, all right, and found them just sitting there, doing their thing and talking with each other.
As our country got deeper into World War II, the quality of kerosene went way down. It didn't burn well enough in our Servel refrigerator to make the box cold, and it left a lot of soot on the wick. So I mixed white gasoline with the kerosene to bring the quality back up. I told my neighbors the good news but they were afraid to mix the gasoline in. So they suffered with warm refrigerators while we enjoyed cold luxury. Again I was out front, but my neighbors thought I was crazy.
We heated our Royston home with oil. It was much more convenient than wood. And although we had plenty of wood, the oil proved to be cheaper than hauling and bothering with the wood.
We had an oil heating stove that heated all four rooms of our house. It would burn used lube oil with just a little kerosene mixed with it. Some filling stations in Hamlin saved their used oil for us. We lighted our heater in the fall and didn't shut it off until spring. I kept an expense account one winter and our entire fuel bill was $12.
By 1940 the price of cream was up and a year later it was up even more. We had a lot of cows that gave a little milk each, and we already had a cream separator. So we bought a gasoline engine to run the separator and I started milking the cows and selling cream. That paid so well that we started feeding the cows more and selling more cream. Our cream was bringing three dollars a day and we were feeding the skim milk to hogs that were gaining two dollars a day. Oh boy! The depression seemed to be over for us. But it turned out that this business had another side to it. The work was killing us.
I sat there milking by hand three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, and the weather was hot. By the time I had milked those twenty cows, I could almost swim in my own sweat. When I walked I could hear it squash in my shoes; and I smelled so bad I had to bathe before the tractor would let me get close to it. There was only one good thing about it; it beat maize hauling ten to one.
While I was milking one cow, Anita was feeding the next one and getting her ready to be milked, Dennis was carrying milk to the house and pouring it into the separator which was being driven by the gasoline engine, and Ima was filling in here and there and keeping house and seeing after Larry.
The kids always wanted me to milk Old Pet last. They could ride her out of the pen and up by the house as she went on her way to the field to graze. They got a free ride home and Old Pet didn't mind. She wouldn't pitch nor run, but just walk as though there were no kids around.
But there was one day Anita fell off Old Pet. They were riding the cow in the cow lot after a rain and the lot was boggy and messy. Dennis was in front and Anita was on behind him. The cow started under a low shed and Dennis realized that he would be dragged off it he didn't do something. There was no way to stop the cow nor turn her, so Dennis did something all right. He grabbed hold of a joist above his head to avoid being dragged off into the filth below. Meantime, since Anita was behind Dennis, she couldn't reach anything to hold onto, so she was forced off backward and landed in a sitting position, momentarily, until she lost her balance and fell backward in six inches of cow-lot slush.
Guess what Ima thought when Anita got to the house. She could hardly recognize her little girl, but she could tell where her little girl had been. The evidence was not all on her back. She had to roll over on her stomach to get up and out, so her front and her long hair had quite a bit of evidence on them also.
Experimenting had taught us that cows would do almost as well grazing sudan grass a couple of hours in the morning and a couple of hours in the afternoon, as they would if they grazed all day, and the grazing would last twice as long. So when the weather was dry and grazing was scarce, we would drive the cows out and close the gate after a couple of hours grazing each morning. Then we would turn them back in at four o'clock in the afternoon. But this presented a problem. We were not always home at four in the afternoon. What could we do about that? Let the alarm clock turn them in, of course. And that is what we did. I rigged it up and it worked perfectly. It opened the gate a lot better than it built the fire in the wood heater many years before.
We had no electricity on the farm until 1949. Before that time rural electricity was only a promise of better things to come. Sometimes the summer heat teamed up with the lack of a breeze to make the weather almost unbearable. But since I wasn't very well known in Washington at that time, and since I wasn't personally acquainted with my congressmen, I didn't ask them for an air conditioning unit. Instead, I did what I could on my own. I took the gas engine from the cream separator and put it on an oil drum outside one window. Then I put a large fan blade on the shaft, aimed it toward a window, cranked it up and let it blow air through the window and all through the house. It was far short of air conditioning like we have today, but it was a lifesaver sometimes, and it wasn't inflationary.
Now, all this hard work, dry weather, inconveniences, and low farm wages got us to wondering if we might be missing something. So in the fall of 1943 we toyed with the idea of getting into war work. Later the toying became a definite plan which led to the purchase of a travel trailer. In November we stored our furniture, left our farm machinery for Earl to sell, and headed for California. We knew some folks who had gone to California from Royston and they told us to come on out, the wages were fine. We called it war work, but its purpose was twofold, to help produce the weapons of war and to help the Clarence Johnsons make more money faster. But getting into war work wasn't all that easy.
Before I could work at any job I had to get a release from farming, because farming was an essential industry in the total effort toward winning the war. I went to the Sweetwater Employment Agency Office and they couldn't give me a release. They sent me to the Abilene office, and Abilene didn't have the authority to grant me a release either. They told me I would have to go to the Sweetwater office. I told them that Sweetwater had sent me to Abilene. Then they told me I would have to go to Dallas.
But I didn't go to Dallas, I went home. I figured that Dallas might send me to Chicago and Chicago might send me to Washington, and I didn't want to go to Washington. I kept hoping someone would send me to Los Angeles, because that's where I wanted to go. But they didn't. So we got ready and headed for California anyway. Crazy, you say? Sure, most of my friends thought so, too. But I knew what I was doing. I was backing my judgment and going out on my own again, like building a tractor, like repairing a motor bearing, like not letting Federal Offices shove me around.
Every town of any size had an Employment Agency. Every Agency had the authority to grant a permit to work. All I needed was to qualify for a permit. They called the permit an availability slip. And without the slip, no one could hire me. They didn't want people switching from job to job. They wanted all of us to stay put and produce goods to win the war. Now, I was producing about enough on the farm to feed my family. And I figured most any of my neighbors could make the old farm produce that much while I was away. That's one reason we headed west.
We stopped somewhere west of Hamlin and east of California and I applied for a permit. They handed me a form and I filled it out. But, since I was a farmer, they couldn't release me and give me a work slip. So, what now, go back? Certainly not. California was west and that's where we were going. We never could get there by turning back.
So we drove on westward and I tried another office. I filled out a form just like the one before, only this time I knew not to be a farmer. This time I was a welder, self employed. Now, actually that was no fib. Many of my friends back home would tell you I was a better welder than I was a farmer. In fact, I was better at a lot of things than I was at farming. I was a lousy farmer.
Welding rated high in war work, so I had no trouble getting the work slip this time. Now we could go on to California without looking for Employment Agencies.
At Vega Aircraft in Burbank they wanted me to build boxes. But welding paid more money, so I went to an employment agency looking for a welding job. They said they had no welding jobs open at present, I would have to wait until one opened up. I asked if I could go on out to Vega and build boxes, but they told me welding was a much higher skill and I would not be allowed to work below my highest skill. Then I asked the man, "What do I do while I am waiting, starve to death?" He didn't know about that, but he knew I could not take the box-building job. And that's when I told him, "That's what you think, you just come along with me and watch me." I went out to Vega the next day and signed up and went to work.
At Royston labor was a dollar a day, out here I was making $12.35 a day. Then after a few days, Ima told me I would have to take off from work and help her get the kids started in school. I told her that if she couldn't do that without me, we didn't have any business in California.
After thinking it over a few days, we decided that Ima and the kids might be a lot better off back home in Texas. So, I quit my job and asked for my availability slip, but they wouldn't give it to me. So I took my family to Texas without it. Lucky for me, I had a pocket full of gasoline ration coupons left over from farming, and I knew how to get another work slip. I was still a welder and had not been employed in war work as a welder. When I applied again for an availability slip, I didn't have to tell a fib, I only withheld some of the truth.
I left Ima and the kiddos at Hamlin and I drove on to Orange, Texas, to work at ship building. I signed on as a welder and of course they took my availability slip. Then after that, the welding foreman told me they didn't need welders, and I learned that I would have to work at common labor at about half the pay. I told them, "No, thanks. How do I get out of this place?" The gates were locked and I couldn't get out to go to the office until noon. That was fine with me. I had my work badge on and I could go anywhere I wanted to. I made like a VIP and had a holiday. I figured no one would stop me, and even if they did, they couldn't fire me because I wasn't working. I made a two- hour tour of the shipyard, saw everything and answered to no one.
At noon I went back to the office where they had fibbed to me and asked for my availability slip, but they wouldn't return it. I asked, "Where is the next man higher up?" They showed me his office and I told him my story. But he was not impressed and he could not return my slip either. Then I asked him who was the top man. By this time I was tired of going up step by step. He told me and I went to see him and told him the same story. It was easy to tell by now, I had it memorized word for word. I told the same story and got the same results. Finally I told him, "It looks like you fellows want my slip more than I do. Okay, you can keep it. I'm going to California and go to work at a better job." He warned me that I would get into trouble and couldn't get a job without the slip. But I told him to just come along and watch me, I'd show him.
I drove back through Hamlin and took Ima and the kids to SanAngelo. They stayed there with Ima's folks and I went toCalifornia alone.
At the employment office in California, I told the lady I didn't want to get into trouble, so I wanted to tell her the whole story and then ask her what I should do. She told me that wouldn't be necessary, and added, "Texas and California are two different countries; I'll give you another slip. We need you out here." I took the slip—my third one—and went back to work at the same job at Vega, through the same office where they kept my first slip when I quit and went back to Texas. I gave them this new slip and I guess they were happy, now they had two of my slips. Anyway, I went back to building boxes for them.
All that running around had cost me quite a bit of money. I needed to make up for some of the loss so I worked ten hours a day at my regular job, got off at five in the afternoon, ate supper at the company cafe, drove seven miles and went to work at another plant that belonged to the same company. This second job paid time-and-a-half, and I could work an hour or all night, they didn't care which. The work was there to be done and laborers were scarce. I usually worked until ten o'clock and got to bed by eleven, so I wouldn't lose too much sleep. However, on Saturdays I worked all night.
Then one day I got this telegram from Ima that read something like this, "Can you meet me at the Union Depot on Thursday, March 19th at 5:45?"
Well, on my way down to my other place of work I had noticed a telegraph office. So I stopped in one afternoon and sent Ima a reply. After all, she had asked a question; the least I could do was to answer it. But I didn't see any need to send her a long message. I figured we could talk with each other after she got to California.
Now, if her telegram had said, "Meet me at a certain place at a certain time on a certain day, I could have replied, "Okay." But since she put it in the form of a question, I replied, "Yes."
I wrote her name at the top of the form, my name at the bottom, and handed it to the man behind the Counter. He looked at it, and then he read it, which didn't take long, and turned to me and asked, "Is this all?"
I told him, "Yes, that's enough."
And it proved to be plenty because, on that appointed day at the appointed hour and at the appointed place, here came that woman with those three kiddos, and they all looked mighty good to me.
I don't think I ever got around to telling Ima how proud I was of her for having learned so fast. Only three short months before, she couldn't take three kids to school a few miles away in Burbank. Now she had learned how to take those same three kids halfway across this big nation of ours.
When they returned to Burbank, Larry was just a bit over a year old and mighty spoiled. Remember, he had been sick when he was very young, and I have yet to see a sick little baby who doesn't become spoiled. He would cry at the drop of a hat, and when it was time for him to sleep, Ima would have to rock him to sleep. He had no intention of going to sleep without being rocked. Then she would try to get him down on the bed without waking him. She failed more times than not. And after each failure the rocking had to be done all over again.
Larry also gave Ima trouble in other ways. When supper was ready, she had trouble getting him to come in and eat. And when she finally got him in, he would fuss and cry while she washed his hands and face and got his food from the stove to his plate. Then they would have another fuss-and-cry battle at bedtime. She could never get him to go to bed without crying and having to be rocked.
Then Ima went to work at Lockheed Aircraft during the summer. Her hours were from four until midnight. So it became my job to get Larry in, get him to eat, and get him to bed. Now, I had heard that, in order to train a dog, you have to know more than the dog. And I figured the same was true with training little boys. And I also figured I was smarter than most any little kid 18 months old. So the first thing I did was shift most of the responsibility to Larry. I didn't try to get him in, I didn't try to get him to eat, and I didn't try to get him to go to bed. I reasoned that he would come in when he wanted to, eat when he was hungry, and sleep when he was sleepy. In short, I left him alone.
We lived in a trailer park. And when all the other kids were called in at night, Larry found no pleasure in playing alone, so he came in out of the dark. And he didn't fuss while I put his food on his plate. I knew when he was coming in for supper. I could hear all the other kids going home, and I had his supper on his plate ready for him when he got there. When he came in through the door. I would wipe his hands and face with a wet cloth. Usually I was through with that little chore before he had time to cry. Then I would tell him to climb up there and eat it. That is, I told him the first day; after that he didn't have to be told. He ate like a horse because by that late hour he was half starved.
At bedtime Anita and Dennis would go to bed in our trailer, and Larry and I would be left alone in our cabin. I knew what was coming next so I was prepared. I beat him to the punch, so there was no fussing at bedtime either. And not one time did I ever have to rock him to sleep or tell him it was time to go to bed.
Larry had a regular baby bed and he also had this habit of never going to sleep without his bottle. Even when Larry woke up during the night, Ima would have to get up and get his bottle and then try to rock him back to sleep. But when Ima started working at Lockheed, we stopped all that monkey business.
I put a pull-chain switch in the light fixture in the middle of the ceiling. Then I put a long pull-cord that would hang loosely across Larry's bed and I tied it to the far corner of his bed. He could reach the cord easily while lying on his back in bed. Then I put two of his bottles in two corners of his bed, down by the mattress so they couldn't fall out or turn over. One was for going to sleep and the other was for going back to sleep after he woke up during the night.
He must have been fascinated by the newness of the whole thing because he listened well as I explained it all to him and showed him just how to reach up and turn out the light before he finished his bottle, and how to wave his hand sideways to find the light cord in the dark, how to get his second bottle when his first one ran empty, and how to be quiet and not wake me up.
After that first night I would merely say something like, "Goodnight, Larry, I'm going to sleep. You can go to bed when you want to." Most of the time I went to sleep while he was still playing in the floor. I often woke up with him lying in his bed nursing his bottle with the light on, but not one time did I ever wake up to find the light on after he had gone to sleep. And he never cried.
Larry was 18 months old in May. When he made up his mind to go some place, he didn't fool around. He didn't walk, he ran. He learned to run about the same time he learned to walk. At our trailer court he was known as Cyclone Johnson.
During the summer of 1944, by correspondence, we made a deal with Uncle Jim to buy the Royston farm from him. So we began thinking about when we should be getting back to Texas. Benny Carriker was living on the farm at that time and when I let him know that we were buying the farm, he wrote that he wanted to move to town by the first of September and we could move onto the place at that time. So we loaded up and moved back to Texas in the latter part of August. But we didn't hurry right straight back to Royston.
We reasoned that we might never be in that part of the country again and I wanted to see a part of Death Valley. I had read quite a bit about it and it fascinated me. So we drove about three hundred miles out of our way that trip just to see the valley. But when we came near it, we learned that the touring season in Death Valley was in winter time. In August it was really a valley of death and almost void of people, especially tourists—and more especially, during the war. Okay, so I goofed again.
At least we were not bothered with traffic. And since we were about the only ones using the road, and since there were some long downhill slopes, and since Dennis had his bicycle in our trailer, he wanted to ride it down at least one of those long slopes. So we got his bicycle out and he got on it and he must have coasted for miles, I don't know how far. We saw one highway sign that read, "Next seven miles downhill."
Then coming up out of Panamint Valley our car had a vaporlock in the gas line. I could blow hard into the gas tank and blow gas into the carburetor. Then the motor would start but by the time it got the car and trailer going up the hill, the carburetor would be empty again.
Now, we had quite a few tools in the car and I always carried some emergency repair parts. A good supply of survival items was a "must" with me. I was sure I would need them some day. And this looked like a good place to use some of them. We drilled a hole in the gas tank cap, cut a valve stem out of an old inner tube and fitted it into the hole. Then Dennis sat in the back seat with a tire pump, pumping air through a long hose into the stem in the gas cap. He pumped and I drove. We came right on up out of the valley without any more trouble. After we reached the top, he quit pumping and we had no more vapor lock. This goes to show why I never throw anything away. Even today I still carry a good supply of old tire tubes, valve stems, lengths of rubber hose, and plenty of hay wire.
We stopped for gas at Stovepipe Wells and the man there seemed to think we would make it okay. The temperature was only 113 degrees. I've seen it hotter than that in Phoenix and they thought nothing of it.
We arrived at Royston only to find that Benny Carriker had changed his mind. He wanted to stay on the farm until the first of the year, and of course we couldn't move in. So, now what? It would be four months before we could get possession of the farm. So we moved in with Mama and Papa in Hamlin and I looked for a job. I thought just about anything would do for four months. I signed on at the Gyp Mill and went to work making wall boards. I worked just one day at the mill, the hardest work I had done in years.
When the alarm clock sounded the next morning, it was raining all over the place. It took me about five seconds to decide what to do. Of course I had been thinking quite a bit about it before. The rain merely pushed me over the line of decision.
The road was not paved from Hamlin to the mill. It would be a mess every time it rained. What's more, the work there was four times as hard as building boxes in California. So I shut off the alarm and rolled over to go back to sleep. Ima asked me what I was going to do. I told her I was going to get some sleep and then go to California. And as usual she thought I was crazy.
Well, I sort of agreed with Ima, but not altogether. This job would just barely pay for rent and groceries. Out west we could live on half my salary and save the other half. So, Burbank, we're coming again. But this time I had an additional problem.
For the first time, I was about out of gasoline ration coupons. And when I went to the ration board in Hamlin, the lady told me I would have to work at least six months before I could get gas coupons to go somewhere else. I was in trouble and I could see that I was going to have trouble convincing her. But I told her the whole story. I really spread it on thick and made it sound rather pitiful—at least I thought I did. I told her I knew I was needed on the farm here, but the other man had changed his mind and I couldn't get on the farm. It was not my planning nor my fault that I couldn't move onto the farm. I couldn't help it. And now I was needed in war work in Burbank.
After all my pleading she had the same answer, "No gas coupons."
Well, I could see that I was getting nowhere with the lady. I figured I had to change my approach or I would never get to Burbank. So I stopped begging and pleading with her, and with a little more firmness in my voice, I said, "Now look, Lady, I'm going to California and I am going to get gas coupons one way or another, and however I get them, it is going to take the same amount of gas to make the trip, and if you will just issue me the coupons it will save me an awful lot of trouble and I will get on out there faster and get on the job sooner."
Well, I could hardly believe my ears. She asked me how much gas I needed. I told her and she gave me the coupons. We were on our way west again.
If all Americans had helped out as much as I did during the war,I know we would have lost to the enemy.
Ima cried off and on all the way out there this trip. It had been hard to find a place to live the first time. She just knew we couldn't find a place this time. And it proved to be just that way—that is, for average people. But I wasn't going to settle for being just average. I knew there was a place for us to live somewhere in California. I simply had to get busy and find it.
When we finally got to California, we heard the same story everywhere we tried, "No vacancy." Real estate firms gave us the same answer. But I reasoned that, if you go fishing and don't catch a fish the first hour, you don't just lie down and cry; you fish some more. There's got to be a fish somewhere in the lake. You just go find him.
After a few hours of the same kind of disappointment a realtor had a listing, "Garage apartment for rent."
The lady asked, "Do you have children?"
I replied, "Yes, three."
"Sorry, no children allowed."
"Would you give me the address?"
"There's no need, no children allowed."
"Would you just give me the address and let the owner tell us,'No children allowed'?"
By this time I knew she was anxious to get rid of me, so she gave me the address. It proved to be quite near, so we drove out to the place and talked with the woman about twenty minutes. Then we parked our trailer beside the apartment and moved in. Then Ima really cried, but for a different reason. She was so happy. This proved to be the best place we had ever lived while in California. And our landlady was a queen.
I went back on the same job, building boxes. Vega had sold out to Lockheed but the change was not noticeable. Lockheed was looking forward to the time when the war would be ended and the company would have to operate with more efficiency. They encouraged employees to submit ideas that might save the company money and speed up work. If an idea was good enough to be adopted and put into use, they would pay for it. I submitted a few ideas, some good, some bad. In all they paid $72 for my ideas.
Much of the time I was at Lockheed I worked in a department where we coated aircraft parts with oil and other coatings for their protection against rust and salt water. The oil was heated before it was applied to the parts. Then when it cooled it became a tough, durable coating. Electric heating units heated the oil, and it got to where the units were not working right. So I asked the electricians to remedy the problem. They mostly ignored my request. After all, who was I, certainly not a bigshot. They didn't have to obey my request. They treated me as though I were a rug for them to wipe their feet on. And after having trodden me under foot they walked away in a manner altogether unmannerly in the eyes of a Texas farmer. I don't think they were really a bad sort, maybe just native Californians acting natural. And maybe they were not quite at home when dealing with a Texas farmer who was also acting natural.
Now, I thought I could repair the heating units, but I knew that a country boy like me might get into trouble with the union if I did anything except just what my card said I could do. So, one day when no one was looking, I repaired the units and got the thing to working like it should work. Then in about three weeks the unfriendly pair of electricians came and notified me that they were ready to repair my hot-oil bathtub. When I told them it had been repaired, they were surprised. They didn't know there were other repairmen around. They asked who did it and I told them. But they didn't believe me. They left quietly, acting as though they thought I was pulling their leg.
One month the box-building crew was packing airplane nosecones for shipment. They had two men, each working ten hours a day, sawing plywood lumber into oddly shaped pieces to fit snugly against the fragile parts to protect against breakage. I was working in the hot-oil department and I had improved the efficiency of the department to the point where my job was easy and I had a lot of time to loaf.
Many of the boards the men were sawing were inaccurate and had to be thrown away as scrap lumber. I recognized their problem and set about to find a solution. Then, working in my spare time one afternoon, I built a jig, made of plywood and fitted onto a sawtable, that enabled me to saw out the pieces accurately and fast.
The next day I used two hours of my spare time and sawed more pieces than the other two men had been sawing in 20 man-hours. Not only that, my pieces fitted better and there were none to throw away. From then on, I sawed out all the pieces in my spare time, and the two sawmen went back to packing nosecones.
One of the Lockheed supervisors saw a lot of the little efficiencies in my work and he told me that, after the war, if I would team up with him, we could make a million dollars. He said that with my brain and his "gab" we could improve the efficiency of factories all over America.
For an example, they gave me charge of the hot-oil department which had been keeping two men busy. I soon had it so I could handle it alone. Then I made more improvements and could loaf half the time. When I took over the job of sawing the plywood pieces, I was doing the work that four men had been doing, and still had time to loaf and see who else needed help. Lockheed was paying me $12 a day and I was saving them the other $36 a day.
During those four months that fall, there was an awareness in the back of my mind that the day was coming when we would need gas to get back to Texas in December. I had saved all the coupons I could, but it looked as though we might be about 25 gallons short. And since I hadn't worked six months at this job, I knew I wouldn't be able to get coupons this time. So, I asked my straw-boss, "Don't you have a gasoline camp stove up overhead in your garage?"
He said, "Sure have. You can use it any time you want to."
I said, "I don't want to use it, just want to borrow it."
We left it up in his garage. But now that I had one, I went to the ration board and applied for gasoline coupons for it. The lady at the board told me she thought 50 gallons would last six months and she issued me coupons for that amount. And so, in just a few minutes I walked out of there a lot happier than I was when I walked in.
Now we had plenty of coupons to take us to Texas. But we still had a little problem. The coupons each called for two gallons and each one had "stove" printed across the front. Some service station workers might frown on the idea of pumping stove gas into Buick automobiles. So we bought our stove gas in five gallon cans and then poured it into the Buick's tank after we got away from the station. The Buick liked it. It didn't know the difference.
Now, you can be sure I didn't enjoy doing these little things which were maybe just a little bit outside the rigid rules laid down by Washington. Of course I didn't. And I'm sure Moses didn't enjoy seeing the waters of the Red Sea close in and engulf thousands of Pharaoh's soldiers. But we both did what we had to do. I was crossing a Red Sea 1200 miles across—and I made it, just as he made it. I'll admit there's one little difference here, God told Moses to do what he did. I'm not quite sure God was the one who told me to do what I did. Maybe the devil made me do it.
Anyway, we got back to the Royston farm that last time and stayed until we moved to Arkansas five years later. It was the first of the year of 1945 and Uncle Jim had not yet started to have the papers fixed up for me to buy the farm. I asked him to go ahead and get the abstract in shape for me as agreed. But three months later he still had not begun. It looked as though he had decided not to let me have it. I couldn't buy it without his cooperation. So I finally made a deal with him to operate the farm on a percentage basis.
Throughout all these years, as our children were growing up, we tried to train them to work out their own problems, answer their own questions, and make their own decisions. One Sunday afternoon when the Willinghams were visiting us, Mary and Anita came skipping around the house to ask me if they could go to Hamlin in our car and get some ice to make ice cream. Anita was probably fifteen years old and Mary fourteen. I asked Anita if she had a driver's license. Of course she didn't have, but she could drive on back streets and be okay. Then I asked her, "And where is the ice plant?"
"It's on Main street, but we could walk and carry the ice to a back street."
"It's 14 miles there and 14 back. You still think it's all right?"
"Sure, that's not far."
"What if you have a flat? Can you put the spare on?"
"Oooh, I hadn't thought of that. We better not try it."
Now, if Anita had known at that time about the traveling I had done alone when I was not much older than 15, I think she might have argued that Hamlin was not nearly as far away as McCamey or the Gulf of Mexico or Denver. And if she had brought up that argument, I think I would have handed her the keys and said, "Good luck Be careful."
At that age Anita hadn't yet mastered the art of arguing. But she was willing and practicing. Dennis was going to town one night to a show or something and he asked Anita if she wanted to go. But she said, "No, Vera and Coy are coming over here tonight and I want to stay home and listen to Vera and Daddy argue."
She listened well and learned fast. I don't believe I have won an argument with her since that time.
There was always something happening on the farm, some good, some bad. One year weaning pigs got so cheap that I couldn't resist the urge to buy some of them and let them run wild about the place. At the Abilene auction sale, I bid on a bunch of the prettiest little black pigs I ever saw. They were selling by the pound. I usually bought the ones that sold by the head, because I didn't have much idea how much a pig would weigh out. But this bunch only cost $1.16 each. There were eight in the bunch. I took them home and turned them loose. Then I bought others from time to time, and we soon had lots of pigs running all over the place. Of course, when they got older, we put them in pens.
Ima ran over one of our pigs in her car one day and killed him. He was about a 25-pounder. We butchered him and he made such good eating, we decided that was a good size to butcher next time.
When Max Carriker learned that we had all those pigs running around the place, he asked about letting him take some of them and sell them. He had a Model A coupe with a pig box in the back end. We told him to come any time and take all he wanted. He sold them at five dollars each and paid me three dollars for the ones he sold. He brought back the ones he didn't sell each day and turned them loose again. He and I both picked up a few dollars on my cheap pigs. Our neighbors didn't know that the pig market had hit bottom.
A neighbor boy and Dennis were out in our pasture one day with their 22 rifles, hunting rabbits and snakes and whatever. After hunting for hours, they came running to the house all excited and out of breath, and told us they had killed something, they didn't know what it was, but wanted us to come quickly. We went and found that they had killed a bobcat. He was the first one we had seen or heard of in that part of the country, and it was the first one the boys had ever seen.
They had been up on Cedar Knob Mountain looking around, and there was that bobcat 12 or 14 feet directly below them, lying in the shade on a ledge. Apparently the cat didn't see the boys. They stepped back quickly and planned their strategy. One boy had a pump-gun, the other one a single shot. They planned to advance quietly to the spot above the cat, take good aim and both begin firing. The boy with the single shot gun carried an extra shell in his hand ready to reload as quickly as possible. Then they walked slowly to their vantage point and carried out their mission.
By the time the boy with the single shot gun had reloaded and fired his second shell, the other boy had emptied the magazine on his gun—all 15 shells, and the bobcat lay very dead. But they didn't know what it was that they had killed, so they didn't go near it, but ran home for help.
We skinned the cat to get his pelt, and would you believe it, we found two bullet holes—and only two—in his head, and none anywhere else. We believe that the boys killed him with their first two shots and missed him completely with all the others.
We lived on that farm 17 years, and if we had lived there 50 more, I believe something new would have happened the last day we lived there, as well as each and every week during that time.
One fall I got a job helping at the Royston gin. I had my welding torch and all my tools in a closed-in trailer. When I wasn't helping gin cotton I was repairing gin machinery. One Saturday they put me to helping load bales of cotton on trucks to be hauled to the Hamlin Compress. The trucks were large truck and trailer jobs. We stood up one layer of bales on the truck, then we stood up another layer of bales on the first layer. Then we placed another layer lying down on top of those two layers. Now, doing all that purely by main strength and awkwardness took a lot of energy and manpower. By the end of the day I was possessed with a lot of awkwardness, and all my manpower was gone. So I used my head.
At the close of work that Saturday, I took all my tools home, and Sunday after church I built an A-frame on the back of my tractor, tall enough to lift bales of cotton three-layers high up on a truck. The tractor motor did all the work. No man ever had to lift another bale of cotton as long as I worked there. The men laughed at me for being so lazy. After that they said, "Give Johnson the hard jobs, he'll make them easy."
Along with all our work, we had our share of fun. Clarence Clark was a farmer who lived about a mile from the Royston store, and he loved a good joke as much as or more than the next fellow. And he also liked to play practical jokes on other people. Nor did he seem to mind if one of his jokes backfired right in his face.
One day a bunch of us were sitting around outside the store waiting for the mail to run—gabbing and "spittin and whittlin," when a man drove up with a fairly good-looking used, wooden icebox in his pick-up. Clark didn't move from his sitting position, but asked the stranger, in a loud voice, "How much for the icebox?"
The man said, "I'll take ten dollars for it."
Now Clarence didn't need the icebox—he didn't even want it. He had one just like it, only better. So, his idea was to play around with the stranger awhile, exchange a few words, sort of horse-trade with him a bit, and then let him go on his way with his icebox.
He reasoned that if he offered anywhere near $10, the stranger might accept his offer and he would be stuck with a box he didn't want and wished he didn't have. But by any standard, no horse- trader is going to sell anything for half what he's asking for it- -leastwise, not without coming down slowly, a step at a time. So, Clark thought five dollars would be a safe offer. So, when the man said, "I'll take ten dollars for it," Clark didn't hesitate to say, "I'll give you five."
Nor did the stranger hesitate to say, "I'll take it."
Clark said, "You'll have to deliver it."
"Sure will. Where to?"
"About a mile. Follow me."
Clark drove his car and the man followed in his pick-up. As the man backed up to the back porch, Mrs. Clark came out of the kitchen and asked, "What have we got here?
Her husband said, "We've got an icebox."
"We don't need it. We've got one icebox."
"You're wrong, woman, we've got two iceboxes."
I don't know what they ever did with the old box, but I'm sure he didn't let it bother him in the least.
At the Royston gin, the house in which we stored our cotton was about 30 or 40 steps away from the office building. The door leading into the cotton house was on the far side, away from the office. The door opened to the outside, and the V-space behind the open door made a nice little outhouse for men, who, for any reason at all, preferred not to walk the long distance to the two- holer when all they wanted to do was stand and drain a load of water against the cotton house wall.
One day I was up in a farmer's trailer unloading his cotton into the cotton house when Clarence Clark came out from the office and stood half hidden, his front half that is, behind the aforementioned door, and began his little chore of getting rid of excess waste water. Whereupon, I seized the opportunity to play a practical joke on this practical jokester, Mr. Clark.
I went to the back of the trailer, leaned out over the tailgate so I could see around the corner of the cotton house and, looking toward the office, I said in a loud voice, "No, ma'am, he's not here now, but he was here a few minutes ago."
Of course, I was only pretending. There wasn't a woman within a half-mile. But, you know, my performance did exactly what I had hoped it would do, only more so. In a fraction of a second, Clark had put away his drainer before he had time to stop the flow of water. I could tell by the way he stepped out from his hiding place that dampness was already down beyond his socks and into at least one shoe. Then in about three seconds, when he realized what I had done to him, he looked up at me and said, "Johnson, I'll kill you for that." But he didn't. And I'm sure he felt better when he got home and got a bath and put on dry clothes.
Now, changing the subject, Anita came home from School one day and asked, "Daddy, why is it that, when kids at school tell a joke or a story, the goofy guy in the story is always named Clarence?" You know, I couldn't think of a good answer to give her, and I still can't.
During those years on the Royston farm, we witnessed the advent of cattle auction sales in our part of the country, and of course they led to other little happenings. I might as well tell about one or two of them right about here.
From our home it was only 30 miles to Sweetwater and 50 miles to Abilene. Those two cities together had at least three cattle sales a week. I was sitting at one of those sales one day, waiting for the cows to start selling, when they began selling a lot of odds-and-ends prior to selling the cattle.
There are times when these odds-and-ends can defy the imagination. Some of the items I have seen sell at such times were old saddles, new saddles, lariat ropes, milk goats, six bantam hens with matching rooster, three quart-bottles of screw worm medicine, a set of badly used harness, four weaning size hound pups, and many others.
Well, on this particular day, I was just sitting there being bored when suddenly here comes a sorrel saddle horse for sale. The bidding got off to a slow start and didn't speed up an awful lot. This gave me time to start thinking, but I started in the wrong direction. True, he was a good-looking animal—beautiful, not a blemish on him, tall and strong, just the horse for me.
Now, what I should have been thinking was, "If he's all that good, why isn't he bringing more money? Why aren't more men bidding on him?" I think I figured out the answers just about the time I made the final bid on the old horse. I think everyone there that day, except me, knew the horse, had owned him a week or two and had brought him back to sell to somebody like me, someone who had not owned him and didn't know about him. In fact, I sold him the following week. Only I didn't take him back to the sale, I sold him to a cow-buyer who didn't know him. And he took him back to the sale a week later.
Anyway, the bidding had only reached $20 when I offered $22.50. But just as I announced my bid, something told me I shouldn't have. And since no one would raise my bid to $25, nor to $24— not even to $23, I found myself with a horse I wasn't quite sure I wanted. I really think the owner had bid the $20 and waited for a sucker like me to raise his bid.
But at home the next day, Dennis rode the horse over to a neighbor's place and came back with a good report. He said the horse was lively, spirited, and altogether well behaved. I was beginning to feel better about my purchase, until a few days later when Anita tried the new horse.
Now, I'm not altogether sure she really wanted to ride the horse. It might have been my idea, or maybe it was Dennis' idea. One thing I do know for certain, it wasn't Ima's idea. However, there Anita was, up on the horse in our front yard, when the wind began flopping her neck scarf. And that was when the old horse began to come unwound.
I was holding the reins and managing to keep his front end fairly quiet and close to the ground, but his hind end kept bouncing up and down, getting higher and higher until Anita landed on the ground right by his front feet. That's when we learned that anything waving or flopping drove the horse crazy and made him pitch. He was not a flag-waving patriotic horse.
The man I sold the horse to learned the same thing the hard way when his hat almost blew off and he reached up quickly to grab it. He said he barely managed to stay on top, but got off as soon as the horse stopped bucking, and walked him to the barn. Next day he took the horse to the cow sale and auctioned him off.
Fortunately, Anita's fall off the horse didn't hurt her, but it sure scared Ima. And now, 40 years later, she still tells people how foolish I was for letting Anita get on the horse. But I say, "Why shouldn't she have ridden any horse she wanted to? After all, she was thirteen years old, and has been riding horses and cows for twelve years."
Ima insisted that she was going to rear her children correctly— protect them, see after them, teach them good manners, good moral standards and religious ethics. And the thought of all this brings to memory the time Anita was three years old, went to sleep in church one night, fell off the seat and broke her collar bone. Now, the way I see it, the moral to all this is, ride more bucking horses and stay away from church. At least, if your pastor can't keep you awake during his talk, sit on the floor.
There seemed to be no end to new experiences and challenges. When I was working at Carriker's river farm, one afternoon at quitting time, Calvin told me to let Dennis saddle old Pony Boy the next morning and ride him over to the river farm.
I asked, "Why not haul him in my trailer as I come to work?"
Calvin said, "He has never been in a trailer, can't get him in one."
It was a six-mile trip and I saw no need for the horse to have to go that far on foot when he could just as well ride. So, next morning I hauled him over in my trailer and Calvin was surprised. He wondered how I loaded the horse.
I told him it was fairly easy. First I tried leading him into the trailer just as I would any horse. He was almost through the loading chute when he decided to retreat. In fact, he retreated all the way back down the chute and out into the corral. Then I said to him, "Okay old boy, since you like to back so well, just go ahead and back."
I backed him across the lot until his tail hit the fence on the other side of the lot. By this time he seemed to be getting the "hang" of it and didn't seem to mind backing up. So I backed him along the fence all the way around to the loading chute, then up through the chute and into the trailer, and closed the tailgate. The entire operation didn't take more than a couple of minutes, and it saved Old Pony Boy a long, hard journey on foot. I really believe he enjoyed the ride, though he never mentioned it to me.
It seems like I mentioned before, that I had never lost a penny on a bad debt. However, there might have been a time or two when I almost did, but it was when I was farming, and not while I was in business.
Yes, this happened at Royston. Hobb Reed and Hester Hammitt each owed me two dollars. Hobb had promised to pay me his two dollars as soon as he got out his first bale of cotton. Well, he got out his first bale, then his second bale, and still hadn't made a move toward paying me. So one day, in the store, back by the post office, I asked him about it. He said, "Johnson, I'm not going to pay you until Hester pays you."
I asked him, "What if I told Bill Carriker I wasn't going to pay my grocery bill until everyone else paid him?" Then I added, "And besides, you promised to pay me when you got out your first bale of cotton, and you didn't."
Hobb asked, "Johnson, are you calling me a liar?"
I said, "Call it whatever you like, you promised to pay me and you didn't."
Then he told me, "Johnson, come outside here, I'll just whip you."
And I said, "Okay, but remember, after you whip me, you still owe me two dollars."
Then suddenly, he became calm again as he said, "Come over here to the cash register, I'll just pay you."
Thank goodness we didn't go outside while he was in a bad mood.He was a lot bigger than I was and he might have half killed me.
While we lived at Royston, Papa had an old Chevrolet car that he was through with and he wanted to give it to Dennis. It was an old, old car, just had a seat and a pick-up bed, no cab at all, tires not worth 50 cents each, all leaking, radiator leaking, using oil, dripping oil, and no license plates. And besides all that, Dennis didn't have a driver's license. I didn't want Dennis to own the old car. But I saw later that I had made a mistake, and told the family so.
Looking back, I can see why I should have allowed Dennis to own the old car. But at the time, I reasoned: Dennis couldn't repair a flat, I would have to do it. With no license, he could only drive it out in the pasture. Thorns would puncture his tires. We had no money to waste on the old car. We had a car and two pick-ups, and Dennis had not shown any inclination toward repairing nor maintaining the ones we had. Besides, one neighbor boy had an old car like that, and one day he was driving down the road and the motor fell out. No kidding, the front end of the motor dropped down and stuck in the ground.
But who knows, this old car might have been just the thing to spark Dennis' enthusiasm and spur him on, all the way up to greasy hands and skinned knuckles. And it might have built up his confidence in himself. Anyway, I regret very much that I didn't allow him to own the old car and play with it. Some of my kinfolks thought I was sort of, if not altogether, cruel to the boy. They convinced me but it was too late. The damage had been done, never to be undone.
Years later, after I had made a lot of changes in my way of thinking, and had repented for many of my shortcomings, there came a time when a daughter of one of those same kinfolks wanted to own a saddle horse in the city where they lived. And there was a time when it looked as though the girl was fighting a losing battle with her mother, who was not altogether in favor of her owning the horse in town. The mother was finally getting a look at a situation similar to the one I had years ago, but from a different viewpoint—viewing her own pocketbook instead of mine. I sent word to the mother not to be cruel to her daughter as I had been to Dennis. I told her, "By all means, let the girl have the horse, regardless of the cost." The girl got the horse all right, but he cost a fortune in trouble, money and inconvenience.
During those last years we lived at Royston, Calvin Carriker built a new house at his River Farm and wanted to put a butane log in the fireplace. But he was unable to find an artificial log that would burn butane, they all burned natural gas. He searched everywhere, and finally brought home a gas log and asked me to change it over to burn butane. I worked on it in my spare time for several days, as well as some time that was not spare. I even went to junk yards and got parts that I had to drill and shape and alter until they would do what I wanted them to do.
After a good many days, I had it burning pretty good. Calvin stopped by the shop one day and left his wife, Nell, sitting in the car. Then, when he saw how well the log was burning, he called her to come and see it. She came in, looked at it and asked, "Calvin, is that the log you bought at Rotan?"
He told her it was, and she said, "Calvin, didn't you tell Clarence that the factory man said they hadn't been able to make a log that would burn butane successfully?"
Calvin said, "No, if I had told him that, he might not have fixed it. He didn't know it couldn't be done."
I remember one day one of Calvin's bulls got through the fence and into the pasture west of his barn. He saddled a horse and went into the neighbor's pasture after him. Well, he came back telling Max and me about a rattlesnake he had seen, but couldn't find anything to kill it with. He wanted the three of us to go hunt the snake and kill it. Max took a 22 rifle and Calvin and I each took a hoe.
It was early spring and the snakes had begun to come out of their dens in the heat of the day. The grass was short but we took no chances. We walked side by side, very slowly, and watched closely. We soon found our first snake, lying at the mouth of a hole, which was about like a hole a badger might have dug. We stopped and stood motionless, whispering plans of what we should do—or at least try to do. We decided that Max was to shoot the snake, and in case he missed, Calvin and I would cut him to pieces with our hoes. Our idea was to hurry and try to keep him from escaping into the hole. Well, we got all set, Max slowly raised his gun, aimed, and fired.
We still don't know whether or not Max hit the snake. We do know, however, that the snake went into the hole, along with four or five or six others. Who knows how many? It all happened so fast. We just stood there—frozen in our tracks, trembling, scared and surprised. We had not seen any except the one snake lying near the opening of the den. We quickly looked down around our feet to see whether there might be others that we had not seen. If there happened to be one behind me that wanted to get into that hole, I sure wanted to jump aside and let him go by.
It was some time before we regained our composure. We were well aware that we must be more cautious and watch more closely than we had been. Then we walked forward, more slowly, closer together, almost stumbling over each other. We walked about 100 yards, moved over a way and took another swath coming back the same 100 yards—and killed 27 rattlesnakes. There were others, to be sure, but we had had enough for one day. And somehow, hunting rattlers was not as alluring as it had been an hour before. We planned to go back some day, but we just never did get around to it.
All my life I have seen cattle round-ups, but people always seem to do things the hard way. And that wasn't for me. A cattle round-up at our Royston farm was unlike any other round-up in the world, so far as I know. We had saddle horses but we hardly needed them. Our cows were in the habit of coming into the feed- lot to eat bundled feed. By simply closing the gate behind them, the round-up was ended. The work we had to do next would take a little more time than the rounding up did. But it was easier and faster than any system I have ever seen.
At least once each year, we had to brand all the new calves, those we had bought as well as those we had raised. We had to reduce the little bull calves to steers, vaccinate all young cattle against blackleg, both young and old had to be vaccinated against some other disease—I have forgotten what it was called, and I'll bet a quarter we farmers didn't call it by the same name that veterinarians called it. And finally, all calves that had not been dehorned had to have their horns cut off. I remember one time we had 25 cows, a large bull, and 55 calves to work. That meant 135 vaccine shots, 30 to be branded, about 20 to be dehorned, and maybe 15 little bull calves to be worked on.
Anita was big enough to keep a fire going and to keep branding irons hot and to hand them through the fence to me. Dennis was big enough to help drive the cattle into the stanchion, hand the vaccinating needles to me, bring in more cattle from the feed lot, and turn out the ones we were through with. I was big enough to catch the cattle in the stanchion, vaccinate in the shoulder with one needle, in the hip with another, brand a Lazy-J on the left hip, cut off their horns, and work the little bull calves.
We never fooled around with a chute because we found that cattle were reluctant to enter a chute. That would be too slow and too much work. Instead, we used a stanchion that was installed permanently between two small pens. It opened large enough for the largest bull to go through and it closed small enough to hold the smallest calf. And it wasn't all that expensive. It probably cost me $1 for second-hand lumber and 50 cents for a rope to pull the top ends of the bars together.
It was easy to get the cows to go through the stanchion since it formed a gate between the two pens. Our milk cows passed through it every day. Most any cow or calf would be glad to go from one pen to another, especially if there were some cows in the other pen.
The system was fast, and by far the easiest I have ever worked with. We three did the 80 cattle one morning but finished a little late for dinner. We sat down to a one-o'clock meal instead of a twelve-o'clock meal.
I mentioned before that we sometimes cut feed for the public. At first, Ima went along to drive the car. But later on, I build an iron "basket" at the back bumper of the car to carry the front wheels of the tractor. Then I could drive the car and trail the tractor and the binder, and Ima could stay home. One patch of feed was 50 miles away in Kent County. Where the road was so sandy that the car couldn't pull the tractor and binder, I would crank the tractor motor and let the tractor push, with no driver on it. And we learned that low air pressure in the auto tires would allow it to go most anywhere in sand. We parked that Buick on top of nearly every sand hill in Carriker's big sand field.
When the binder needed a repair job underneath, we threw a chain over the top of the binder and hooked one end to the frame and the other end to the tractor. Just a little pull with the tractor would roll the binder over for easy access to the underside.
By the end of World War II, our old coal oil cookstove was pretty well rusted out and was looking like a reject from a junk heap. Ima was looking forward to something better. In fact, she knew exactly what that something was, a new butane range. She and I went to Stamford one day to inquire as to whether we would be able to get a butane tank and how much it might cost. We got this information from the appliance dealer. He could sell us the butane and tank, but we might have to wait a year for a permit to buy a stove. He told us we might go to the ration board and find out. Now, I knew we couldn't get a permit from the Stamford board, because that was in Jones County and we lived in Fisher County.
The ration board was only a short distance away, so I went over to ask a question or two. But the woman in charge ignored my questions and, very undiplomatically, ordered me to, "Sit over at that table and fill out this form."
I filled out the form and presented it to the not-so-friendly woman. She looked it over, mumbled a few words, which I couldn't understand, placed another paper before me and said, "Sign here."
I still wondered how long I might have to wait for the lady to answer a simple question or two but by this time I was afraid to ask. I sure didn't want to make her mad, she might never answer my questions. So, when she told me to sign, I lost no time in signing the paper. I didn't know what I was signing and I didn't much care. I only hoped that she would answer my questions when I got through signing all the forms she kept handing me.
When I finally got through signing all the papers and gave them back to her, she still wouldn't talk to me, but she gave me a certificate which would allow an appliance dealer to sell me a butane cook stove without either of us being subject to confinement in a Federal Penal Institution.
I went back and showed the certificate to the appliance dealer, and he was really surprised as he asked, "How did you get that? I have customers who have been waiting a year for one and are still waiting. Some of them would be glad to pay you $100 for it."
I told him I just filled out some papers, and the nice lady gave it to me.
There was no need to lie in filling out the forms. I told the truth all the way. One question I had to answer was, "Where do you live?"
My answer was, "On a farm near Hamlin."
If it had asked, "In which county do you live?" I would still be waiting for the certificate. The lady and Hamlin were both in Jones County. I lived in Fisher County.