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Memoirs
of an Ozark Farm Boy
First Memories
Family
---- Grandmother
----Grandfather
---- Mother
---- Father
---- Roy and Billy
---- The Family Together
Neighbors.
John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath draws a stark and realistic
picture of Oklahoma
farm life in the Great Depression. His characters are so vivid that I feel as
if I knew some of them, growing up as I did on a small farm
in the Missouri Ozarks.
Missouri was
not in the “dust bowl”, but the same general conditions prevailed—money scarce,
prices for farm products so low as to hardly make ends meet for those who
produced them, unemployment rampant. I was born in during that depression on an off-the-beaten-track 120 acre
farm in conditions that resembled Steinbeck's Oklahoma.
“Dry Branch” on my father’s farm is one of many so-named streams in the Ozarks.
It begins on the prairie near the crossing of highway 86 and the Granby-Stella
road, two towns which to "city slickers" might seem dreary little burgs, but if you come to know them,
you will learn that they each have an interesting history and a colorful cast
of characters. Dry most of the year, it could become a raging torrent in heavy
rains, powerful enough to roll large stones along its bottom and sweep animals
away if they tried to cross it to reach the barn for their daily feeding. It
courses its way from the prairie dropping into the hill country, creating a
small valley in its ancient meanderings on its way to Shoal Creek and eventually
to the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi..
My father’s farm included a portion of that valley and the hills above it.
The farm was at the end of a lane, with no public road adjoining it anywhere,
a mile from the nearest highway, with no electric poles or running water. In
spring and summer, a visitor approaching the farm down that lane from the north
through scrub timber and coming suddenly on the valley would be greeted with
a lovely vista. In late fall and winter, on a cloudy day, the valley could be
a dreary place, and at night with no “light pollution” from electricity, it
could be almost pitch black. It was easy to believe the stories of the ghost
of the old lady buried on the hill across from the house wandering about carrying
a lantern. Look! Wasn’t that a light? No, it’s gone. Did I really see it?
But on moonlit nights, even in winter, it had a stark beauty, with tree branches
like etchings back lighted by the stars peeking through. On such a night in, a small boy “going on three” lay in the bed of his grandmother in the
hall of a two room house overlooking the valley. The boy’s mother and father
and baby brother were sleeping in the adjoining bedroom-living room. The kitchen
and a side room used to smoke-cure meat, and a back porch, made up the rest
of the small dwelling. The hall was the only place for the grandmother to sleep.
Suddenly the lonely hoo-hoo-hoo of an owl in one of the trees lining Dry Branch
pierces the night. “Grandma’, the little boy says, “I hear that ol’ hoot owl
again.”
“Yes, honey, I hear him too.”
“Why does the owl hoot, grandma?”
“I don’t know, honey. Maybe because he is lonely and doesn’t have a little
boy owl to keep him company like you do me.”
And on and on the questions. Finally, the mother calls from the next room:
“Roy, hush.
Grandma needs to sleep.”
“You hush,” grandma admonishes her daughter. “Grandma won’t be around always.
Let him talk about the hoot owl if he wants to. It’s good for his imagination.”
This is my earliest memory of my life. I cannot guarantee that the above conversation
is accurate word-for-word, but I remember the hoot owl and my mother admonishing
me to hush and my grandmother sticking up for me. My mother was in ill health
and had my brother Billy, two years my junior and a few months old at that time,
to care for. Probably she needed her sleep too.
This will be the story of my life beginning on that Missouri farm, and of the
cast of characters that influenced it. My mother's parents were living with
us, and I have included them in my memories of my earliest "family". My father's
parents will come into the story later. My mother was busy with Billy during
the years of my first memories, so my grandmother took over with me. So let’s
begin with her.
My grandmother Mary Elizabeth grew up on a small farm near the village
of Avilla, Missouri.
She was the daughter of a slaveholder who moved his family to Missouri just before the Civil War. Mary Elizabeth
spent summers on her grandfather’s farm in Tennessee. He was also a slaveholder and her
playmates were the children of the former slaves, who had stayed to work for
her grandfather because he was kind to them. From them she learned a number
of old plantation songs, which she liked to sing around the house in later years.
It was said of her grandfather that he treated his slaves like family, educated
the slaves’ children alongside his own, and refused to sell a slave even if
he needed money because he didn’t want to break up families. Mary Elizabeth
viewed blacks as equal to whites, and passed those views along to me via my
mother. In the racist society of those times, this was a very important influence
on me and played a large part in my participation in civil rights issues in
later years.
Her mother was a frontier “schoolmarm” and Mary Elizabeth would have been a
wonderful teacher. She taught me to read using phonics by the time I was three
years old. There was a candy store in Granby, and when we went shopping on Saturdays,
my mother would sit me on the counter and I would read the headlines in the
newspapers. I could sound out the long words, sometimes with comical effects
since the English language is not always phonetic, even if I didn’t know what
the words meant. The proprietor would give me a piece of candy as my reward.
From what I have seen of her letters, my grandmother was a gifted writer and
a very intelligent lady. I believe her influence started me on a lifelong interest
in books and reading.
My memories of her have blurred a bit with the years. I remember her walking
about outside wearing a sunbonnet, and I remember long walks that we took in
the woods. She loved the woods and the many plants and flowers, and could describe
them vividly. I’m sure she did much more to stimulate my imagination. She died
the summer I was four, while washing dishes in the kitchen. How I wish she could
have lived longer so I could have learned some of those old plantation songs,
now probably lost forever. She was quite a lady.
There was no more room in the house, so my grandfather George Warren Pace slept
in a former one room schoolhouse that my father had purchased and used for storage.
It was on the corner of a neighbor’s property a stone’s throw from our house,
but the neighbor did not require him to move it. It had a large room for the
classes and a smaller room built on as a cloakroom. It was fitted for a wood
stove, and the cloak room was my grandfather’s bedroom. My memories of him are
replete with contradictions. But first perhaps I should explain how my grandparents
came to be living with us.
My grandfather was a railroad worker and was assigned to Granby as a section foreman
ca 1910, and was moved to Diamond, a nearby small town, some time around 1930.
In 1931, heavy December rains flooded nearby Shoal Creek. He was aware that
a passenger train was due in Granby
and that there was a weak trestle on the railroad bridge north of town . He
took a helper and went by handcar (you pump a handle up and down to make it
move down the railroad track) to try to shore up the trestle. Apparently it
was against railroad regulations for him to do that without orders and without
more help. He fell into the creek and nearly drowned. The railroad fired him
for his efforts, a year short of his 65th birthday, when he would
have been eligible for a pension under the Railroad Retirement system. There
were no unions in those days to protect him. The citizens of Granby
circulated a petition on his behalf, but it did no good. Destitute, he and my
grandmother had no choice but to move in with my parents.
In my younger years I remember sitting on his lap or next to him as he told
us stories of the “b’ars and painters” (bears and panthers) that he encountered
in his life on the prairie near Nevada, Missouri. In later years, I asked my
mother if the tales he told us were true. She smiled and said, “Well, some of
them were.” He liked children, and it was said of him that he could take a crying
baby and nestle it on his shoulder and the crying would stop. People attributed
this to the “electricity” in his body.
His ancestors came to western Missouri at about the same time as those of
Harry Truman. The frontier conditions of that era are vividly described in David
McCullough’s excellent Truman biography. My grandfather talked of cutting wood
in the snow stripped to the waist and sweating. He was a short stocky man of
great physical strength but little education and not much use for “book larnin”’,
in sharp contrast to my grandmother.
He was a devout Baptist, the descendent of a long line of Baptists--one of
his ancestors was one of the earliest dissenters from the Anglican Church (the
established church of Virginia in colonial
times) and actually donated the land for the first Baptist church established
in Virginia,
in the 18th century. I remember him sitting in the “Amen corner”
of the Granby
Baptist Church,
lustily singing the hymns and calling “Amen!” each time the preacher made a
telling point. He had no use for Catholics. I learned later that he had been
a member of the Ku Klux Klan, which surprised me, as he was good friends with
the few blacks who lived in Granby and sternly warned his children that if they
ever “made fun” of the black children as some did, he would blister their behinds.
Later I learned that many of the Klan chapters in Midwestern areas with few
African Americans were more anti-Catholic than anti-black, and that fits his
character well.
In our glamorization of the heroism of our frontier ancestors, we sometimes
forget that there was an unglamorous side. Frontier conditions were rough and
dirty, and not conducive to personal hygiene. My grandfather had never brushed
his teeth in his life and had no use for dentists. He thought they caused cavities
poking around with their sharp instruments. He died at 77 without ever having
lost a tooth. He shaved only twice a week, once at midweek with a straight razor,
then on Saturday, he went to Vern Fitzgerald’s barber shop in Granby
for a shave.
But he had even graver faults. He was a carping, cranky man, never saying anything
nice to my grandmother. I learned later that in earlier times he abused her
physically while they were living in Granby (as he did his animals also), then would
go to his barn and cry. He obviously had deep seated problems. My father, a
kind and gentle man, only once responded to his complaints: “Dad, I sure hope
you go to heaven, because you and the Devil would never get along.” As he grew
older and Billy and I grew a bit more rebellious, we would sometimes respond
to him with taunting, and he would throw his cane at us.
On the other hand, he was generous and would give us money from his meager
Old Age Pension (a precursor of social security introduced by Roosevelt) when
we went into Granby.
Once he gave us a whole dollar—a huge sum to a pre-teen in those days. Five
cents would buy an ice cream cone, a candy bar, or a coke. We went up and down
the streets of Granby
spending money, and there was hell to pay with our parents afterward—we were
supposed to break the dollar and bring him the change!
He was a man of his word and honest to a fault, and if I inherited any of his
characteristics, I hope it is these and not some of the less desirable ones.
His daughter, my mother Ena Ann, was fortunately not of his temperament,
but unfortunately she did not have his robust health. She battled Lupus Ery-thematosis
, the worst kind, from my earliest memories to her death at age 67. I remember
well the red butterfly shaped pigmentation across her nose when I was a small
child. That disappeared, but lupus-caused bronchitis and bronchiectis plagued
her the rest of her life, and she never felt well. She weighed less than 98
pounds at a height of five feet four inches. She was not able to work as hard
as most farm women do, and had to rest frequently.
My mother was a town girl, growing up in Granby from age ten, when my grandfather became
section foreman on the railroad there. She attended 9 years of school, more
than most females of that day, and in a time when education was more rigorous
than now. She had read some of the classics and had studied a year of German.
Her diary and letters show that she inherited the gift of words passed on by
her mother and her schoolteacher grandmother. She did not speak with the Ozark
accent of my father and most of our neighbors, possibly also the legacy of her
Indiana-born grandmother passed through her mother. She was a fine pianist and
music teacher, with a certificate from the Juilliard School of Music in New
York, qualifying her to teach 14 years of piano, acquired without
leaving Granby—the Juilliard school certified
instructors who returned to their communities and could in turn certify their
students, and there was an excellent Juilliard instructor in Granby.
In the 1920s she played piano for the silent movies in the Granby theater, a difficult task that required
synchronizing tempo and mood with the actions of the characters on the screen.
My mother had close contacts with blacks and her generally favorable attitudes
helped pave the way for my later activism in racial causes. Calvin “Cal” Jefferson,
a black man, was a leading businessman in Granby in most of the first
half of the 20th century. He owned the livery stable, the main employer
for Granby’s
local black community. He was a superb musician and played the mandolin. He
could come into the movie theater at any time with his mandolin, and Mom said
she would be playing for a movie and she would hear Cal chime in behind her. He played entirely
by ear. She told me that he tried to teach himself notes, but some whites came
in and took the notes away from him and told him it would ruin his music. Apparently
he humbly acquiesced. There was a belief among “ear” musicians that learning
notes took away from the spontaneity.
Leaving the theater late at night, my mother would cut through behind the livery
stable, a dark area that many would consider scary. Someone once asked her if
she wasn’t afraid to walk by the livery stable at night. She recognized right
away that the remark was racial, as Cal’s night crew would
be on duty there. “No,” she said, “If anyone tries to bother me, I’ll just scream
and Cal or one of his workers will come out and rescue me.” And they would have.
However, like others in the area at the time, my mother’s racial attitudes
were “betwixt and between.” She taught me that blacks were just as good as whites
and would never allow me to “first name” elderly blacks, as some whites did.
They were Mr. or Mrs., or by local custom, “Uncle” or “Aunt”. However, she believed
firmly in “separate but equal.” Once, when a black neighbor was visiting our
farm on business, I was playing with one of his sons. She called me into the
house and told me that I should be nice to him, and that he was just as good
as I was, but not to make a special friend of him, because “the Lord created
the races to be separate.” I was ten years old and believed everything my mother
said, and I felt very awkward after that, as I didn’t quite understand how to
be nice but not make him my friend.
Prior to marrying my father, my mother was married to a man named Bob Goade,
a relative of Billy’s wife Lee Ann Goade. They married in 1917, just before
the US
entered World War I. He was a miner, an incredibly strong, good looking, fun
loving man. They divorced, but my mother never spoke ill of him. She was a fun
loving person also, and she talked sometimes of the “wild” things they did as
a young couple. There were stories of his great strength and of the strange
things that he did. One is worth repeating.
The miners rode into and out of the mine shaft in an enclosed elevator-like
car that held several men, pulled by a steel cable from above. On the bottom
of the car was a hook that was used to lift the buckets of ore out of the mine
during the working day. At the end of one shift, the first group of miners stepped
out of the car at the surface, and the “hoisterman” (the man who operated the
motorized cable lift) was preparing to send the car back down for the next group
when a voice from underneath said “pull me on up.” There was Bob Goade, hanging
from the hook by one hand with his lunch pail in the other, his feet dangling
over several hundred feet of mine shaft! He had grabbed the hook as the car
started up.
Some time in the 1920s, he and my mother moved to Picher, Oklahoma,
where he had a mining job. In the late 1920s they separated and she moved back
to Granby. I
do not know what the immediate cause of the separation was, but my mother just
said that he was untrue to her. I heard the rest of the story later from a relative.
In an attempt to reconcile, my mother and her brother Tony Pace drove to Picher.
There, they found him living with another woman, who was home alone when they
arrived. The woman protested—“He told me he was single! I didn’t know he was
a married man!” My mother, a feisty woman despite her ill health and frail frame,
replied, “Don’t worry about it, he won’t be a married man long!” They drove
back and she filed for divorce. Bob Goade married the woman he was living with.
Lee Ann said later that he was never well thought of in the Goade clan after
that.
Disillusioned with romantic love, my mother was looking for stability, and
my father, a hard working, serious, and sober man, provided that. He was a widower,
with a reputation as for honesty and dependability. He had saved enough money
to buy a farm and own it free and clear of mortgage—quite a feat at the peak
of the depression in 1931, their marriage year.. He had been married briefly
to a woman in ill health who died after a brief time together. The woman’s son
by a prior marriage, Albert Susskey, told me in later years that he always admired
my father for the tender way that he took care of his mother in her illness.
My father was 30 and my mother was 37 when they married. Neither of them married
for love; my father’s family, especially his German mother, believed marriage
was a practical arrangement. “I don’t believe in this courtin’ stuff,” my grandmother
Johnson often said, “find a good man and marry him.”
I knew little about their courtship; neither of them talked about it, but my
mother said Dad picked her up one day and said “Let’s go to Neosho.” She had a pretty good idea that they were going
to get a marriage license, but nothing was said about it until they got there.
My parents never demonstrated affection that I saw, but I know that they came
to love one another deeply as time went on, and my father grieved greatly at
my mother’s death.
Like my mother (and indeed, all of us) my father was shaped by his family and
background. His Johnson ancestors were quintessential hillbillies, coming to
Missouri in the late 1800s via Kentucky,
Illinois, and various other stops on the way.
His great-grandfather, Absolum Johnson, took his family to the McDonald County
hills because they resembled his Kentucky
hill home. There is a family story that Absolum and a brother had to leave Kentucky in a hurry because
someone shot someone (details unclear) in a dispute over a hog in a garden.
They split up and no one knows what happened to the brother. They were fiddle
players and hunters, and it was said that they treated their dogs better than
their women. The traits of hunting and fiddle playing passed through the generations;
my father was an ardent ‘coon hunter and so are several of my cousins, and Billy
was the last of five generations of fiddlers. But I did not inherit those characteristics;
I never cared for hunting, and I tried but eventually gave up fiddling because
I simply lack the manual dexterity for the fast tunes.
They were also stubbornly independent and self reliant people. My father’s
grandfather, Jim Johnson, son of Absolum, was 18 when the family arrived in
Missouri.
The women and wagons had come separately, and Jim discovered that his favorite
deer hound had been left behind. So he saddled up and rode the several hundred
miles back to get the dog.
My grandmother Johnson was of German extraction, second generation, but she
grew up speaking German and attended German schools, and as a result, she sometimes
had trouble with English. Her husband kidded her about her expressions – “It’s
just hill up and hill down all the way there and back”. I did not understand
how so many of her offspring and descendents were so deeply dark complected
until she told me that an ancestor (her grandfather, I think) had married a
Spanish migratory worker who came through Germany picking grapes. This was apparently
a family disgrace, and she told me about it reluctantly, still feeling the shame
after two generations. I had uncles and cousins who could easily pass for Hispanics.
My father was born in a box oak cabin outside of Bethpage, Missouri,
not far from Stella, on September 16, 1900. He was the oldest of a family of
13, 11 of whom survived to adulthood. The family eventually moved to Neosho. As with my mother’s family, long before my birth
there was a connection with African Americans and black history which, I believe,
also influenced my lifelong interest in race relations and civil rights causes.
There was a black midwife in Neosho, Aunt Mariah
Watkins (it was customary in the area to refer to elderly blacks as “Aunt” or
“Uncle”). It was with Aunt Mariah that the famous Negro scientist George Washington
Carver stayed when he was living in Neosho
and going to school.
Aunt Mariah delivered many of Neosho’s children,
black and white. The books about Carver’s life state that Aunt Mariah delivered
triplets for “a poor white family”, the first triplets born in Newton County,
and a sensation in the area at the time. That “poor white family” was my father’s
family, and the triplets were his siblings, Bessie, Jessie, and Lessie. My aunt,
Minnie Johnson Bell, told of how Aunt Mariah placed an axe under the bed to
“cut the pain”, and then put a plate in the living room for the many visitors
to donate money to help the family raise the children. Aunt Mariah called to
check on the children later, and my aunt told of how they would ask her to eat
with the family. She always refused or found something else to do. Undoubtedly
she had been well schooled to “know her place”. Blacks were generally liked
and even respected in the area at a time when there were lynchings and riots
in other places, but that does not mean there was equality—there were “rules”
that governed black-white interaction. Nonetheless, the fact that there was
personal interaction gave my family a different perspective on blacks which
would influence my attitudes in later years.
Aunt Minnie even got to meet Carver once, when he was visiting Aunt Mariah,
but she was unaware of his importance at the time. She said she thought he was
“just another elderly colored man.” Her attitude is typical of the friendly
but condescending attitudes of our area. Blacks were liked and respected but
not on the same plane with whites. During the 1960s in a conversation about
civil rights activism, Aunt Minnie, who had been a nurse, to ld me that she
would have difficulty accepting a black person as a supervisor, but she allowed
as how that change was coming, and if the younger people could accept it, that
was okay. She didn’t doubt that blacks had the ability. The Neosho-Granby area
did not have the harsh racial attitudes of some other locations, but racism
was all around us in subtle ways. Nonetheless, these softer attitudes made change
easier when it did finally come.
Dad’s father, Thomas T. Johnson, did not regard education highly, and kept
my father out of school so much that he did not complete three years of education.
Dad regretted his lack of education and I believe this is one of the reasons
that he supported all educational activities fully for Billy and me.
Thomas T. Johnson was a man of frail health and (so I have been told) was not
overly ambitious when he was in good health, and he could not support his family.
My father went to work as a water boy on the railroad at age 13, and from that
well into his 20s, he faithfully turned over his check to his parents, having
no young life of his own. Being a water boy was not an easy job. He had to carry
water from the nearest well or spring, which might be near or might be a mile
away, in two heavy buckets. The workers liked to tease the water boy and would
sometimes flip a half filled dipper of water into his face. One man was especially
bad about this, and would take a sip and toss the entire dipper on Dad. One
day Dad turned the tables and dumped an entire bucket of water on his tormentor.
The man was hot and sweaty, and the cold water put him out of action for awhile.
The foreman said he had it coming to him, and Dad was not punished.
Later, Dad drove spikes, a hard and tiring job. In those days before unions,
if a person straightened up to stretch without the foreman’s permission, he
could be fired. Once, Dad was on a job and in line for a promotion, perhaps
to foreman, and was working near a depot when a train came in. It was a tradition
to “highball” (wave to) the engineer, and as Dad did so, he stumbled and fell
back in a sitting position on a stack of railroad ties. He got up immediately,
but a company man was on the train and saw Dad on the ties. He ordered the foreman
to fire the man who was “sitting down on the job” and would listen to no excuses.
The foreman said he knew Dad was one of his best workers, but he could do nothing.
Dad got a job with another railroad company, but never was able to advance to
a better paying position.
Having never been a real teenager, my father did not understand the social
needs of teens and tended to be strict with our social life. In our teen years,
my mother had to intercede to get him to let us use the pickup truck one night
a week to go to Granby to the roller rink. We were to go nowhere
else, and especially no hanging around with the “drugstore crowd” afterwards,
because “that’s where trouble starts”.
Dad never made much money in his life, and he was frugal to the point of parsimony.
I believe this was caused by the financial insecurity of his family and his
early life. He did not have skills that commanded a high income, and the only
way he knew to get ahead in life was to hang on to what little he could make.
As pre-teens, when we went to Granby for shopping on Saturdays, Billy and
I received ten cents each to spend. That would buy a coke and an ice cream cone.
I learned that an ice cream soda was fifteen cents and a milk shake was twenty
cents. I asked my father if I could have a little more, maybe once a month,
to buy one of those drinks. His answer was that if I really wanted them, I could
save up for two weeks. On another occasion, we were at a county fair, and it
was past noon and I was hungry. Dad gave me a dollar to buy something to eat
and said to bring him back the change. I bought a hamburger and a milk shake.
As I recall, the total was about sixty cents. He was upset with me. He intended
that I buy a cheese sandwich (twenty cents) and just drink water to “tide me
over” until we could go home and I could eat more there. “Poor people can’t
afford to eat like that” was his statement.
I believe Dad’s frugality was out of concern for his family rather than any
natural stinginess, for he was as generous with things that he considered worthwhile
as he was stingy with “frivolous” things. When Billy developed talent on the
violin, he managed to buy him a good one for $100.00, a large sum then, representing
nearly a month’s farm income. And when I joined the debate team and needed money
for a debate trip, he would hand me a twenty dollar bill, nearly a week’s earnings,
without hesitation. No matter how great the need, he would never take us out
of school for farm work, in sharp contrast to his father’s practice. His contribution
to my college education, I learned later, amounted to nearly a third of his
annual income. I can now understand why he felt he needed to be so tightfisted.
If this makes him sound like a stern disciplinarian, this would be a misconception.
He never spanked Billy or me. He rarely raised his voice to us. He was kind
and gentle, toward my mother and all others. But there was something about him
that commanded authority, and if he told us to do something, we would do it,
without question. Nor was he hard on us regarding work. We sometimes worked
long days, but we could always stop and rest if we needed to. If there was something
hard or dangerous to be done, he would do it himself and give us the lighter
work.
This tender and caring side of his character was shown in other ways, both
to neighbors and to my mother and other family members. In the 1950s he bought
a hay baler and baled hay for hire. Unlike some other locale balers, he would
go into tiny rocky fields almost too small to turn around in. There was no profit
in those fields, and if the baler picked up a rock and was damaged, there could
even be a loss. Billy would sometimes complain, “Dad, we’re not making any money.”
Dad would answer “The man needs to have his hay baled. He has to make a living
just like we do.” His economic concern extended to others as well as to himself.
He was, however, a hard man to analyze. When there was nothing he could do
to help, he could seem totally unconcerned. As my mother’s illness progressed,
she could be sick in bed and he would go about his work apparently unconcerned
since there was “nothing he could do”. On the other hand, I have described his
caring treatment of his first wife, the mother of Albert Susskey, and he was
equally tender with my mother when there was something he could do. In
her waning years, when she could no longer work and the pain of Lupus and its
derivative diseases were wracking her body, he would give her a rub down every
night no matter how tired he was from doing the farm work, cooking, and house
work. His mother was also in decline at that time, perhaps Alzheimer’s although
we didn’t know that term, and other family members brought her out and dumped
her on Dad to take care of. Dad took on the task willingly and never complained,
even though, as Billy said, he had “two dotty women” to take care of plus operating
the farm. Of course Billy lived nearby and could help some, but he had a full
time job and his wife, Lee Ann, also worked and they had children to care for,
so the main burden was on Dad.
It should also be said that it was Dad’s frugality that made our lives in
the depression better than that of some of our neighbors. He was as canny as
he was frugal. In 1931, at the height of the depression, he paid cash for our
120 acre farm, saved from his hard labor as a low-paid railroad worker. There
is a slightly amusing side to his purchase. His parents were renting the farm
at the time. They knew he was looking for a farm to buy. Someone came to look
at the property, and that’s how his father (Thomas T.) learned the farm was
for sale. Thomas T. told the prospective buyer that the land was so poor it
wouldn’t grow peanuts, then immediately contacted my father.
The farm was owned by three absentee landlords, 2/5, 2/5, and 1/5. My father
managed to buy out two of the owners at $10.00 per acre, a low price even in
that time. The other owner asked what he intended to do with it. He said, “farm
it and bill you for your share of the expenses, unless you would rather sell.”
The owner sold. Owning a farm with no mortgage enabled Dad to be self sufficient,
cutting wood from his own land for heating and cooking and supplying our family
with meat, eggs, milk, butter, and canned fruits and vegetables that we produced
ourselves. There was always food on the table even though money was scarce
Dad didn’t trust lawyers, and I don’t know where he got his legal education,
but he did all real estate business directly at the title company and dictated
the details. He later bought an added 80 acres of land, and gave it to Billy
as his “start in life” (mine was my college education). When he wanted to transfer
the land, he supplied the wording – the land was not a gift, but was to be sold
to Billy for “one dollar and other considerations, in the value of fifteen hundred
dollars” (the “other considerations” would be Billy’s assistance around the
farm), thus avoiding gift taxes. In later life, he arranged to deed the home
place to Billy and me while preserving a life estate for himself and our stepmother
(our mother had died and he had remarried), thus avoiding probate. He was not
a good writer or speller, and he sometimes had difficulty finding the words
when trying to explain something, but he knew the words he needed to get these
things done in the legal documents.
My mother and father were not demonstrative or affectionate people, but Billy
and I were raised in a calm, peaceful, common sense environment—important, I
think, in developing our dispositions and our character. Except for Granddad
Pace’s fussing, there were no quarrels in our home. Billy and I can only remember
one emotional dispute between our parents. Dad had very few bad habits—although
he was not a churchgoer when they married, he was a non-drinker, and when he
took a job in the mines during World War II, the miners joked that his worst
swear word was “by jabbers”. He did smoke, but he rolled his own cigarettes
to keep the cost down, and my mother did not object, although she wished he
would quit. His only “bad” habit was gambling—the miners met in the bunkhouse
on Sunday afternoons and shot craps. One Sunday, he lost $100.00, a fortune
at that time, and later that afternoon my mother made a rare trip to the barn
while we were milking. Billy heard more of it than I did, but I guess they had
it out. After the milking, my mother said she wanted to take a walk “down by
the branch”, where she and I often walked, and I wanted to go with her. She
said, “No, honey, I would just like to be alone for a little while.” Nothing
more was ever said, but that was the only quarrel that we knew about, and my
father never went back to the mines to gamble again. Shortly after that, he
was “saved” and joined the Baptist church and became an avid proselytizer His
ardor finally cooled but he remained a churchgoer the rest of his life.
In my teens and early twenties, I did not have a lot of respect for my father’s
intelligence—a common characteristic, I think, of young people breaking free
from parental restraints. Looking back, I have a different view. There was a
depth to him that I did not recognize; he just did not have the verbal skills
to vocalize it. I had became a religious doubter, casting aside the fundamentalist
faith of my parents. My mother somehow got wind of it, and was lying in bed
one night worrying about the condition of my soul. Our preachers sometimes spoke
of the “unforgivable sin”, which was usually defined as denying God. My mother
was afraid I had committed that sin. My father—as described to me by my mother
in a later conversation—said, “Now Ena, you got to understand that Roy
thinks deeper on these things than we do. He’s a good boy and he’ll work it
out. I’m not gonna worry a minute about it.” And he turned over and went to
sleep. That seems to me to indicate a profundity transcending the outward appearance
of his limited vocabulary and fundamentalist faith.
Most of the time Dad was serious, without a lot of levity, but he sometimes
displayed a wry and slightly ribald sense of humor, and when he did, his face
was lit by a mischievous grin. Billy’s son Allan tells of an occasion when he
was 11 or 12 and was working with Dad. Having trouble straightening up, Dad
said, “That’s the trouble with getting old—everything gets stiff except what’s
supposed to.” He added, “You’ll understand what I mean when you get older.”
Allan said he understood it anyway, but pretended that he didn’t.
The earliest memories that I have of my brother are of the golden curls that
he had as a toddler, in sharp contrast to my own straight-as-a-string brown
hair. Mom was so taken with Billy’s curls that she just let them grow rather
than giving him the short haircut that little boys usually sported. At that
time, little girls usually wore dresses, and Mom told me that while she was
shopping, she overheard someone say, “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen that little
girl in a dress.” He did indeed look like a cute little girl.
As we grew up, he was the more active one. He was “daddy’s boy”, always tagging
along when he could and helping with farm chores. His greatest aspiration was
to be a farmer. My life shaped me differently. I was in poor health as a young
child. I had a condition diagnosed as rickets, but the usual treatment of cod
liver oil did not work, and I there was no change until, when I was six or seven,
a new doctor in Granby
suspected a vitamin B-complex deficiency and, with vitamin doses, I began to
improve. When I was in second grade, I had a seven week long bout with pneumonia
and almost died. As a consequence of these and other experiences, I was less
active, more of a dreamer, more interested in reading books. Mom said that,
even as a baby, I could entertain myself for hours with my toys and not bother
anyone, while Billy was constantly bothered because he couldn’t go outside and
there was “nothing to do.”
Nonetheless, when we played together, we never quarreled as some siblings did.
Reminiscing in our later years, we could only recall one fight that we ever
had. We were playing “Tarzan” and swinging from some wild grapevines and he
accidentally knocked me off a vine. I thought he did it on purpose and “lit
into him.” Our cousin, Dorothy Pace, witnessed the event and told our parents,
and we got in trouble. Different as we were, we could work or play together
and get along in perfect harmony.
Dad tended to be a little partial to Billy while Mom worried about my health
and took my side more often. When Daddy bought Billy’s $100 fiddle and I got
nothing, my mother was upset and said “What is Roy going to get?” It was
decided that I would get all of the other musical instruments in the house—a
banjo, a mandolin, and another fiddle that Dad had, together worth perhaps $100
at that time. The mandolin was a cheap one, and the strings soon raised up so
high it wouldn’t play at all, but strangely it turned out to be a collector’s
item and I sold it on the Internet for $256.00 many years later. Of course
Billy’s $100 fiddle had probably appreciated in value also.
Strangely, however, I in many ways was more like my father and Billy was more
like Mom. I tended to be more practical like my father, not sentimental about
things, and not a worrier as Mom was. When Mom was ill and needed help, as she
often was, we would both help her about equally, but when I was done, I could
become absorbed in a book or do something else and not be concerned, while Billy
was constantly anxious about Mom, checking on her every little bit to see if
she was okay. This meant a lot to her, and it is only now that I am older and
hopefully wiser that I realize that I should have done the same.
Billy and I would grow up working side by side together on the farm, respecting
and caring for one another, but he was loving it and aspiring to follow in Dad’s
footsteps, while I was counting the years until I could get away. My feet got
so cold milking the cows on winter mornings that they didn’t warm up until mid
morning at school; he apparently had better circulation and did not have that
problem. I liked summers better but there were still abhorrent aspects. The
job of shocking grain (following the grain binder and arranging the bundles
in shocks with a “roof” to keep them dry until threshing) wore the insides of
my arms raw and the sticky chaff caused itching as it adhered to my sweaty body.
I could see nothing to like about it. I didn’t know for sure what I wanted to
be, but I knew it wasn’t a farmer.
But although we respected and cared for one another, it is hard to say whether
we were “close” in the usual sense of that term. I do not recall that we discussed
our dreams, ideas for the future, fears, or deeper emotions. Perhaps we really
didn’t have many. Since our parents rarely expressed emotion, either negative
or positive, we just tended to follow suit. As we grew older, we played together
somewhat less. I became a reader and in free time would climb a tree or go to
the barn with a book, while Billy called for me to come and play baseball or
some other active game. I wouldn’t answer. One reason was that I just couldn’t
compete physically and it was no fun. I remember once I said “let’s see who
can hit that fence post first with a rock.” Billy said, “Which one---that one?”
and popped it with a rock on the first try. I had to throw ten or twelve times.
So I read my books and hid away while he found something active to do on his
own.
I believe our relationship only became really close in later life, as we both
began to realize the depth of our common bond from growing up together. I was
really looking forward to our later years when we could reminisce and combine
our memories of our early years—Billy’s memory was sometimes more sharp and
detailed than mine. And when, at age 62, he became terminally ill of cancer,
our bond deepened still more. It took me a full year to even partially recover
from his death. He was a wonderful person and a loving brother.
Together our mother and father provided the basic elements to mold the character
of their two children. My father was practical, pragmatic, not given to sentiment
much less sentimentality. Although he was a kind and gentle man in his relations
with others, slow to anger, and liked and respected by those who knew him, he
could be stubborn to the point of rudeness about the matters of the heart that
make us human. He was opposed to gift giving among adults, sending of cards
on special occasions, anything that did not have a practical purpose. When later
in life, we gave him gifts anyway, it was something he wouldn’t use, he would
openly state that fact rather than thanking us for the gift. My mother enjoyed
walks in the woods and loved the beauty of nature; my father’s walks in the
woods always had to have a practical purpose. I refer to their differences as
a contrast of “head” and “heart” – the practical and logical side of our natures
and the emotional and sentimental side. My mother’s diary, kept from 1948 to
1960, brings out her love of beauty and expresses her philosophy of life, which
was tied closely to her deep religious faith. Two excerpts from that diary will
make my meaning clearer than I could with any words of my own:
Oct 29, 1948--Goodness! Nearly all of Oct. gone and I haven’t written in
my book. Guess the days have just been too full of other things. There was
our trip to Uncle Frank and Aunt Stell Johnsons. [in nearby McDonald
County, a hilly and rocky
area]. That was Sunday 17th and how beautiful the hills were. Bob argued that
they were not worth a dime an acre. The boys and me said that perhaps they
were not worth much for growing food but the rocky hills have their place
in God’s plan. As scenery they are worth millions and even a pauper can feast
his eyes upon their beauty and feel rich for “The earth is the Lord’s and
its fullness thereof.”
We drink from the clear running streams, we breathe the pure fresh air, we
bathe in the health giving sunshine, and enjoy the beauty God put here, too
often just taking all these things for granted and not giving the proper thanks
and praise to the Almighty. If we should land in the bad place with all those
things taken from us then we would realize how mercenary and unimportant were
the few dollars and cents we rattled in our pockets.
Of course I don’t mean that we should not try to attain enough of this world’s
goods to see us through the world but to keep in mind that money and the things
it will buy are only things of the world and we will lay them all down some
day.
May 15, 1954--Yesterday Lee Ann and I went for a walk in the woods. It brought
back memories of times when I roamed all over these woods with two little
boys. I guess I am writing these trivial things because it is probably the
only way my grandchildren will ever get to know their daddy’s mother. And
after all these little things are what makes a life. Like piecing a quilt,
you sew all the small pieces together to form a pattern and when you are through
you have a large beautiful quilt. But if you fail to get in the little pieces
or fail to put them together right you have marred the beauty of your quilt
This contrast of “head” and “heart” would affect both Billy and me. I believe
in our earlier life I followed my father’s lead more while Billy tended to follow
his heart, although as we both matured, we moved closer together and realized
that each of us had taken much from both our father and our mother.
Life on our farm was fairly isolated, and these four people made up most of
my world and Billy’s during our early lives. But neighbors would also play a
role, and we had some interesting ones There was "Uncle Green" Emory,
our neighbor on the farm near the entry of our lane on the north, a quarter
mile away. Uncle Green was a former slave who, as a boy of 12 or 13, served
as drummer for his master’s unit in the Confederate army. (He is probably one
of the "black confederate soldiers" which the apologists for the southern
cause list on their web sites. It is unlikely he was actually made a soldier,
as it was illegal in all Southern states for blacks to be inducted into the
Army.) I remember him driving up in his Model T Ford, sometimes with his wife
and daughter, "Birdie", to talk farming business with my father or
just for a visit. His dignified appearance with his deep black skin and snow
white hair made quite an impression on this little white boy. His favorite saying:
"There's no such thing as a ‘civil’ war." Today, I can hardly believe
my life touched the life of a former slave. I wish there were some way to learn
more about him. What a story that would make! And how fortunate I was, at such
an impressionable age, to know blacks as real people rather than as distant
stereotypes.
“Uncle Green” died when I was five or six, and the Horton family moved in.
They were only neighbors for a short while and I do not remember all of their
names, but their son Dickie was between Billy and me in age. I recall one incident
worth telling.
Court croquet was popular in our area, and my father had a good sand croquet
court. People came from all around to play croquet, and they took the game very
seriously and became totally engrossed. While they were so engaged, Billy, Dickie,
and I, ages about five, six, and seven, would play together. While playing in
the Hortons’ car, we chanced to open the glove compartment and there were two
packs of cigarettes and a book of matches in it. Dickie, trying to sound adult,
told us pompously that one pack was his and one was his father’s, and we completely
believed him. He opened “his” pack and we all three lit cigarettes. We left
the car and wandered around among the men puffing on the cigarettes. They were
so engrossed in their game that none of them even noticed!
After the Hortons moved out, the Alexander family moved in, Ruby and Irvin
and their children, Nadean and Carol Gene, our age. We became playmates, but
we were never allowed to visit just when we chose. Typically, we would visit
them, our parents telling us to come back in two hours, and Ruby would keep
the time for us and tell us when to leave. Sometimes they would be allowed to
come with us for a two hour stay. Those rules were strictly observed.
Irvin was an honest and hard working but not overly verbal man who sometimes
got his words mixed up, as was illustrated in one comic-tragic incident. We
were playing at their house near an old junk pile, where there was a discarded
gasoline tank. Carol Gene told us that it was “fun” to sniff the gasoline fumes
from the tank. Billy and I took a sniff but decided it wasn’t too good an idea
to overdo it, but Carol Gene stayed at the tank for some time. When we spoke
to him and we didn’t answer, we knew something was wrong. We managed to get
him up and, between the two of us, to the house, where Irvin immediately put
him in the car and took him to Neosho to the
hospital.
Afterward, he told of how we had saved Carol Gene’s life when he was “pixilated”
(asphyxiated). We never laughed; the situation was too serious.
The Alexanders were a tragic family. Ruby worked at Camp
Crowder in Neosho
during the war, and began having an affair with a co-worker. We of course didn’t
know about it at the time, but Irvin came to our house in a high state of agitation
one day and asked to borrow our rifle. My father sensed something was up and
managed to not be able to find the ammunition for it, thus preventing a killing—Irvin
planned to shoot his wife and her lover. Their marriage broke up, Ruby married
her lover, and Irvin wandered aimlessly around the country doing odd jobs, which
we knew because he paid us a visit later in life and told us of being arrested
for something he didn’t understand – “lautern” (loitering; he didn’t even know
the word). To me, it means being homeless, jobless, and with no place to go
and no money.
Carol Gene joined the military and died young; Nadean married but became an
alcoholic, living in Ritchey, a town near Granby.
I located her and called her. It was not a pleasant experience. The exuberant
Nadean that I had known, a cheerleader for our high school and full of life,
was listless and obviously not interested in renewing contact.
John and Fannie Gibbons, on the next farm east and a half mile away, provided
some comic relief. We likened them to “Maggie and Jiggs”, comic strip characters
of that time. John was an affable, easy going man who never seemed to be bothered
by his nagging, quarrelsome wife. He told of one incident with a great deal
of glee. He drove a battered Model A Ford. Fannie did not know how to drive
and knew nothing about cars. While they were out driving, the gears lodged,
and he was trying to shift them.
“John, what in the world are you doing?” Fannie said.
“Trying to get these gears shifted.”
“Well, John, why didn’t you shift those gears before you left home?”
John and Fannie had six children. Doris and Carol Jean were the same ages as
Billy and me, Joyce was a little older, then Ed and Vickie, the oldest. Like
most farm families, they had a rifle to shoot “varmints” and hunt rabbits and
squirrels. One night, a whippoorwill was singing so loudly that Vicky couldn’t
sleep. She got the .22 rifle and shot in the direction of the bird to scare
it away, and it stopped singing.
The next morning, she went to the tree and found---a dead whippoorwill! Shooting
a bird with a .22 rifle is difficult in daylight, and she had intended only
to frighten it. She was quite upset that she had actually hit it.
Our family and the Gibbons family visited fairly often and borrowed from each
other when needed, and we were instructed to go to them if there was ever trouble
and for some reason our parents weren’t available. When I was eight or nine
years old, my mother sent me to the bedroom to discipline me for something I
had done wrong. Granddad Pace, being his usual cantankerous self, demanded to
know why I was being disciplined. My mother told him it was not his business,
but he insisted and tried to force his way into the bedroom. Mom told me to
go out of the house and get away from him, so I did—far from the house! Billy
and I decided the situation was serious and ran to the Gibbons farm. We told
Doris and Carol Jean that Granddad was going crazy. The four of us decided to
sneak back and see what was happening. We crept down Dry Branch, which ran from
their farm to ours and was deep enough to provide cover, and peered up the hill
at the house. Finally, we heard Mom calling and realized that we had better
get to the house. The situation with Granddad had of course quieted down by
then and she had things under control. She was quite upset at what we had told
the neighbor children! We thought we were being heroic, just like the characters
in the western movies at the Granby
theater, creeping up on the bad guys, but we learned better!
I still don’t know how we pulled that off without John or Fannie knowing what
we were doing. Usually, none of us left home without permission.
The Gibbons family shared the relatively tolerant racial attitudes of our neighborhood.
Irma became a teacher and moved to Tennessee, where, long before the Civil Rights
era, she was outspoken in her opposition to segregation. “These un-Christian
signs!” she would exclaim about the “colored” drinking fountains and waiting
rooms. “I guess you want to marry one of them,” was a common taunt. “Well, I’m
not about to marry some of the white men around here!” she would respond. I
don’t imagine she was too popular.
The Murphy family lived on the farm next to the Gibbons family, and their land
joined ours on the southeast corner. Two daughters, May and Louise, were among
our playmates, and there was a younger daughter, Mary Alice, who was crippled
and had to wear leg braces. Granby
was a lead mining town, but the mines had closed as the remaining lead became
too sparse and difficult to extract. During World War II, the mines reopened,
due to the increased demand for lead and better mining methods. My father and
Glen Murphy both took jobs in the mines. My father rose at four in the morning,
fed the animals and did the milking (Billy and I helping as we grew older),
worked eight hours in the mines, then came home and did the evening milking
and chores. He and Glen Murphy became close friends, talking of their plans
to use their saved mining income to improve their farms when the war ended and
materials became available again.
Then tragedy struck and Glen was killed by falling rock. My father was the
only miner with the grit to go into the “drift” and remove his mangled body.
My dad immediately quit his dangerous mining job. He said his family was more
important than the wages he was earning, and he did not want to risk leaving
us fatherless.
The “Rambo boys” were our nearest neighbors to the west on their 640 acre farm,
considered large in our area even though there were four of them. They were
droll, slow-talking farmers who refused to buy tractors or modern implements.
They farmed with horses and horse drawn implements into the 1950s and 60s—“what
was good enough for our parents is good enough for us.” But they were considered
successful farmers and their barn and outbuildings were the best in our area.
They even had a windmill and a gasoline engine to pump water when there was
no wind, while we drew our water hand over hand with a rope. The one cylinder
engine was called a “one-lunger”, having only one cylinder. It had a very distinctive
sound. It would fire intermittently, then rotate a random number of times, then
fire again, with a pop-whump-whump-whump-pop-whump-whump sound that I can still
hear when I close my eyes. They held old fashioned values, believing that a
man’s word should be his bond. When my father bought his farm and needed just
$75.00 to complete the deal, he was turned down by the banks for a short term
loan. He went to the Rambos and they loaned him the money—a respectable sum
in those days—without asking for a note or any paperwork.
I always enjoyed talking to the Rambos. Their naiveté was absolutely unbelievable
and completely charming. In later life, after I had done a bit of traveling,
they would listen with wide eyes as I told them of things I had seen, and ask
simplistic questions as if I were some kind of expert on world affairs. Their
world did not extend much beyond the boundaries of their farm. Two were married;
two were bachelors. They lived in two houses on their farm, one bachelor living
with each married brother. When Frank Rambo, one of the bachelors, died, the
obituary stated that he died in the same bed that he was born in. That doesn’t
happen often today.
To me, the Rambos were quintessential gentlemen, true country squires, absolutely
without guile, and I always respected them. They had excellent relations with
two black brothers, Roy and Ambrose Hutcheson, who lived just across the road
from their farm, and in a prejudiced age, they showed not one iota of that vice.
Roy Hutcheson was married and had a family; Ambrose was a bachelor. The farm
was Roy’s. When he sold the land and moved into
town, the Rambos allowed Ambrose to move the house on to their land and live
out his days there, rent free. The world could use more of their kind.
Raymond “Tot” Rambo, one of the two married brothers, was the only one to have
a child, Janey, one year younger than my brother Billy, three years younger
than I. Janey was a tomboy who would rather play baseball than play with dolls.
When Billy and I visited, we often went by bicycle, riding double. Once she
asked us if we would teach her to ride the bicycle. Our method of “teaching”
her was to push her as fast as we could run, then let go. She stayed upright
for awhile then eventually fell off. Far from being upset with us, she was delighted.
I can remember her ripping a gash in her leg as she went over a barbed wire
fence to catch a fly ball. She eventually became a high school athletics coach.
We lived a mile from the Rambos; the black family across the road lived closer
to them, so Janey’s most frequent playmates in her younger years were the four
Hutcheson boys, sons of Roy Hutcheson. Janey grew up absolutely without prejudice
and, in response to racist comments, stated that she would just as soon marry
one of the Hutcheson boys as any white boy she knew. That was a courageous statement
for a girl to make in those years.
Tot’s wife “Bea” played a role in our family. When Billy and his wife Lee Ann
worked, Bea sometimes took care of his children, especially Allan, the oldest
boy. He became “Grandma Bea” to Allan, who was blessed with an unusual number
of grandmas.
The Hutcheson family lived on the perimeter of what we considered our neighborhood,
and our relations with them were not as close as with the others. They were
an interesting family. Ambrose, the older brother, spoke with a “black” accent
and exhibited the subservient characteristics that blacks had learned to assume
around whites. Roy
was quite the opposite. His bearing was straight and dignified, his speech articulate,
and he looked everyone, white or black, in the eye when he spoke. It was obvious
that he considered himself anyone’s equal. In some areas of the south, he might
have been considered an “uppity” black, “trying to act like a white man”, but
in our area he was both liked and respected. Some whites said “Roy Hutcheson
doesn’t know he is black”, a statement that might be offensive to African Americans
today, but it must be taken in the context of the time, and it was said admiringly.
Roy had the
intelligence, demeanor, and bearing to be a bank president and a leading citizen.
He was the janitor at the Neosho court house.
Tolerance in our area was greater than some, but was still restricted and there
was a “glass ceiling” above which blacks could not advance. And I think our
rural neighborhood, along with the town of Granby, was somewhat more tolerant than Neosho.
Roy was a good
friend of my father’s and as I grew up, he became my friend also. After I became
old enough to “first name” my elders we enjoyed “Hi, Roy”-ing one another when we met at the court
house, and I would always stop for a conversation with him.
A bit further away was the farm of George “Preacher” Lewis, who lived with
his large family in an unpainted ramshackle large house that had been a hotel.
A portion of his rambling farm land joined ours on the north. Why he was called
“Preacher” is a mystery; he was never known to set foot in a church, and his
earthy and usually profane expressions would have banished him from any pulpit.
I wish I could remember some of them—only two will come to mind: “Hotter than
a f----d sheep in a cocklebur patch.” “Nervous as a cat on a tin roof trying
to cover up s—t.” He seemed to have an expression for every occasion, some of
them hilariously apt.
Preacher was an easy going kind of man whose farm was not the best kept in
the neighborhood, but he and my father had a good relationship and were friends.
Neighbors worked for one another in harvest season, and my father would bale
hay for Preacher and in return he would work for us when needed. He never kept
track of the time or seemed to keep any books—he just accepted my father’s time
count and came to work when asked. He was careless about settling up if there
was a time difference at the end of the year, but my father just forwarded the
time to the next year. It was worth it to have someone to call on when work
was needed.
We tend to lose track of one another in today’s mobile world, and I do not
have current contact with any of our former playmates. It seems that it is
only as we grow older that we grow sentimental and wish we had maintained
ties to our former friends. Sometimes contacts can be reestablished, but often
it is too late. Such is life.
On to Chapter 2