The Life of Me - an autobiography Part 16

As we all know, dogs have a keen sense of hearing. They can hear sounds that we humans can't hear. And as we also know, 12-year- old boys like to see dogs fight. Show me one who doesn't and I'll help you try to find out what is wrong with the boy. I was 12 at that time.

Old Scotch was by far the easiest dog I ever saw to sic onto anything he wanted to get onto. And he usually wanted to get onto any dog that happened to be close when one of us boys said, "Sic 'em." I think maybe this was because the dog lived such a lonely life. Of course, he had us humans to keep him company, but there were no other dogs about the place to accept any of the commands to sic 'em. So he had to be alert at all times and do all the dirty work himself. He was so accustomed to the word sic 'em, and he had become so easy on trigger, he was off and away before the full word was spoken. He didn't wait to hear the "'em" part of the word, he didn't even need the "c" part, but only the "si" sound, and he only needed to hear that part in a whisper.

Now, that was all I said that day-just an almost noiseless "si"-a mere hiss of wind through my upper front teeth. And I remember, Old Scotch looked up at me as if to ask, "Did I hear what I hope I heard?"

I looked at him and winked one eye and barely nodded my head toward the other dog and smiled and very quietly-almost silently- -repeated, "Si-," and in a split second he was all over the other dog like a crow on a Junebug.

After Papa had stopped the fight, Old Scotch looked at me with a question-mark expression on his face. I smiled back at him just to let him know he had not misunderstood me, and he came over to me for a pat of approval, which I gave freely.

No one had heard the "si-" except the dog and me. It would be our little secret. I certainly wouldn't tell, and he couldn't tell. I gave him a few friendly pats; he licked my hand and wagged his tail-the only way he knew how to say, "Thank you, it was fun while it lasted." Then he went back to investigating and making friends with the other dog.

CHAPTER 12

MY INVENTIONS AND HIGH SCHOOL DAYS

In the meantime, after we got back home to Hamlin, Papa gradually got into the trucking business. The truck replaced the horse in our lives and after a few years we sold our horses. Then Papa began to wonder if a truck would pull a trailer. He had a good wagon he didn't need, so he thought to himself, "Why not make a trailer out of a wagon?" He tried it and it worked. He cut the tongue off short, hooked it behind his truck and hauled cottonseed to the oil mill at Hamlin from gins in Hamlin and from gins in small towns near Hamlin.

While Papa was experimenting with new innovations, I was doing some experimenting on my own in my spare time. Before we got electricity in our home, I had learned that the telephone company was in the habit of throwing away dozens of old batteries from time to time. Most of them were dead, others were sick and dying, but a few of them still had a little life in them. By connecting enough live ones together, I had enough current to light flashlight bulbs.

I had brought back hundreds of feet of small insulated wire from electric blasting caps at Gorman. I strung the wire all through our house and had little night lights in all our rooms even before we got city current. Although the lights were small, they gave enough light to prevent most of the skinned shins which were usually caused by vicious chairs that jumped out and tackled a fellow as he made his way from his bed to the back door on his nightly journeys to the outhouse.

I also had an Erector Set which had a little motor that ran off the old batteries. It came in handy in a lot of my experiments. We heated a part of our house with a wood-burning heater. I didn't like to get up and build a fire on a cold morning. So I got to thinking, "Why not make my old alarm clock light my fire?" One night I rigged the thing up before I went to bed. The next morning when the alarm went off, it started the motor that struck the match that lighted the kerosene that lighted the kindling that lighted the wood that heated the room.

Well, did it work? Sure it worked, cross my heart. But it wasn't practical. I didn't expect it to be. It was more trouble to rig all that stuff up the night before, than it was to build a fire next morning and jump back into bed while the room warmed up. I just wanted to see if I could do it, and I could.

Once I hooked a bunch of those old dry cells to an auto horn and it really sounded loud in the house. Then one night while Joel was away from home, I made a pressure switch and put it under his mattress so that when he got into bed it would honk the horn under his bed. He was out with his girl and I knew he'd come in after we were all in bed, and more than likely all asleep. So I began to have second thoughts about my little scheme. Papa and Mama would be sure to frown on the idea of being waked up in the middle of the night by what would seem to be an automobile coming through our bedroom honking its horn. And I knew they would frown on me for doing it. So I got cold feet and disconnected the thing before Joel got home.

During the 1930's many farm families had battery lights in their homes. They had "windchargers" to keep their batteries charged. The windcharger was a wind-driven generator. The more the wind blew the more it would keep their batteries charged. In 1921, when I was fifteen years old, I made the first wind-driven electric plant I ever saw or had ever heard of. I took a magneto off an old car and changed the wiring in the inside so it would put out an alternating current instead of a jump spark. It wouldn't charge a battery but it would light a flashlight bulb when the wind blew. I mounted the plant on top of our house above my room. I left the light switched on all the time. It burned day and night, if the wind blew. And the brightness of the light was a good indication of how fast the wind was blowing.

After we got city current I did further experimenting and learned more about electricity. For instance, I liked to get a little shock now and then from the city current. And I learned that I could touch the two wires just a wee bit with the tips of my thumbs and fingers and enjoy a little electrical tingle. One day I tied two metal handles onto the ends of two wires so I could get a better hold and enjoy even more shock. I already knew that a tighter grip on the handles would give me a stronger shock. But what I didn't know was that when the shock reached a certain degree of intensity, it would cause my hands to grip even harder, and I found myself unable to open my hands to free myself. Lucky for me, I had tied the wires onto the light fixture hanging in the center of the room. I couldn't open my hands, but I dropped to the floor and pulled the wires loose from the fixtures.

One day Albert found an old sewing machine motor in a trash pile in an alley. I was glad when he decided to sell it to me. That was another one of my dreams come true. I was ready to do more research and playing. The motor did a lot of things for me, but the thing that was worth the most to the family was the fly- chaser I made out of it.

In those days we Johnsons still didn't have screens on our windows and doors. We just barely had windows and doors. Anyway, I took the electric motor and mounted it on a wooden box with its shaft sticking up. Then I fastened a stick to the motor shaft and a fringed cloth to the stick so that the fringe would float three inches above the food on the dining table. When I placed this monster in the middle of Mama's table, she was not at all pleased.

You see, Mama remembered some of my earlier gadgets, one of which had blown up all over her kitchen stove, cabinet, walls and floor. Some of it even hit the ceiling. Nevertheless, by the time Mama became brave enough to come near her dining table on this particular day-the day of the fly-chaser-I had the motor in the middle of the dining table, sending the fringed cloth round and round, shooing all the flies away. It proved to be a lifesaver. No fly ever lighted within its magic circle. Mama could place all the food on the table and feel sure that no fly would ever light on any of it.

After Mama realized the value of this latest invention, she got back on speaking terms with me. And I sort of guessed she might be happy in the thought that her little ugly duckling might just make his mark in the world after all .

Oh yes, I mentioned the blow-up in Mama's kitchen. That was quite a different story. I had gotten this toy steam engine for Christmas. To make it run I had to fill the boiler with water, light the alcohol burner under it, and then wait ten minutes for the steam to make the wheels start turning. Then about two minutes later the boiler was dry of water and the whole operation had to be done over. That amounted to too much waiting and not enough wheel turning to suit me.

I reasoned that a larger boiler wouldn't have to be filled so often, and there would be more action each time I heated it. So I put a valve stem from an inner tube in the lid of a gallon syrup bucket. And I ran a small rubber hose from the valve stem to a little pipe on the boiler of the toy steam engine. Next I filled the bucket with water and placed it on Mama's wood cookstove and waited-and waited and waited.

And that's when it happened. It blew up. The lid hit the ceiling, and water hit the four walls and everything in the kitchen. I was glad Mama wasn't in the kitchen. The noise alone was enough to scare her half out of her mind, and it brought her running in a hurry. And now let us have a moment of silence while you imagine what Mama said to me. Of course I was sorry it happened. The kitchen might never be the same again. And I was sorry to have scared her. But mostly I was afraid she wouldn't let me do experiments in her kitchen again.

After the steam cleared out of the kitchen, Mama allowed me to return to the scene just long enough to remove the "thing" to my own room. Then I found that the little rubber tube was stopped up. Steam couldn't get through it.

Oh well, air seemed to be much safer and faster anyhow. So I borrowed Papa's tire pump and pumped air into the little toy boiler. That worked just fine. One stroke of the pump and the wheels started turning. Only trouble was, I had borrowed the tire pump without asking, and the next time Papa needed it, it was out of place and he couldn't find it. Again I was in the doghouse.

Electricity seemed to be in my life to stay. At age sixteen I owned my first electric train. It was not the steam-locomotive type, but the true original electric-type engine. I bought the train myself and it proved to be a lot of fun. By that time I had known the truth about Santa for a couple of years and I figured he wouldn't be bringing me one. So I started saving up my nickels and dimes and bought my own train. A year or so later I bought my first and only bicycle. It lasted me until I bought my first car.

By that time I had begun to believe a fellow could do about anything he set his mind to. So I gave a kid a dollar for an old one-cylinder gasoline engine with its carburetor missing. I knew I couldn't buy a carburetor for it, but I was confident enough, or foolish enough to believe I could make the thing run without one. I was right; I could and I did. That is, I made it run without a real factory-built carburetor. The one I gave it was a small tin can stuffed with rags that were saturated in gasoline. The vapor from the can was the gas that it ran on.

I made the little engine pull Mama's washing machine-which she was in the habit of making me pull. Of course it was more work keeping the engine running than it would have been just simply running the washer by hand. But it was more fun my way. And besides, I liked to do things that others couldn't do,-things some mechanics said couldn't be done.

When I got hold of an extra dime now and then, which was not needed for something else, I would go see a movie. But my slow reading caused me to miss part of the story during the old silent movie days. So I began dreaming of the time when we would be able to go to a movie and listen to the stars talk and sing. I worked the whole thing out and told my parents and some of my friends just how it would be done and how the mechanism would be set up. Some of them listened, but some of them walked away, slowly wagging their heads as if to say, "Poor Clarence, he finally flipped his flopper. He has gone plum crazy."

Three years later they came out with a stupid phonograph and tried to keep the talking on the record correlated with the picture on the screen. It was four years after I invented the talking picture that they finally put the sound on the movie film where I had put it in the first place.

I was out front on automobile generators too. In the early 1920's generators were dealing us plenty of trouble. Their commutators were the biggest headaches. By 1924 I had invented a direct-current generator without a commutator but with two collector rings instead. I even applied for a patent on my invention. But I ran out of money and had to give it up. Then 39 years later, in 1963, most all American-built cars came out with my generator on them. They are now called alternators. Of course my generator was not exactly like the alternator. We didn't have diodes in 1924. My generator didn't need diodes.

Along with my experimenting, I was reading mechanics magazines and in one of them I saw the International Correspondence School advertis.e.m.e.nt and enrolled in an electrical engineering course. I learned a lot from it but I was not financially able to buy all the things I needed to do the experiments which would have helped me learn and understand much more. Furthermore, there was not another kid in town with whom I could work and study, nor who was interested in learning about electricity with me. So, electrical engineering lost much of its charm and glamour. However, during my high school days, my cla.s.smates and teachers nicknamed me "Edison." I kept the stage lights in repair for all events. And when an office light needed attention, they sent for me. They never required me to buy a ticket to any school activity. I kept the lights working all over the building. I carried a key to the building and came and went as I pleased, day and night.

Along with my other activities, I have studied and practiced a little bit of character reading. Since my teens I have had this thing about being somewhat able to read a person's character on sight-at least I liked to try. When I was 18 I was visiting a kid in another town and he showed me a picture of his high school cla.s.s, 32 kids. I looked at the picture, then I pointed to one girl and told my friend that she was the top student in his cla.s.s in English. My friend was surprised but he admitted that I was correct. He became even more surprised when I picked the best math student, the most mischievous boy, the one who liked to play good clean practical jokes, the one who was the most active in the art of deceit designed to really hurt others, the best football player, best all-round athlete, and several others. After I had finished, the boy told me I got about 20 of them just right, ten partially right, and two absolutely wrong. Oh well, you can't win them all.

I have been in business off and on many years in my life and I can't remember having lost a penny on a cold check or a bad debt. I have a way of trusting people that I judge to be okay and it seems that they want to prove that I have not misjudged them.

This ability to judge rightly has helped me and others many times. One day a stranger was driving through Hamlin on his way to Bronte where he was to go to work on a ranch. He was out of money. I bought him five gallons of gas and a quart of oil. Three days later I received the money from him by mail.

Why did I trust the stranger? I don't know. He looked okay. He acted okay. He didn't ask for credit nor any other favor. Instead, he asked if he might camp out behind our service station for three or four days. My boss told him it was all right. Then when he asked to borrow a pencil and a piece of paper, I learned he was planning to write his employer a letter and ask him to send a couple of dollars for gas and oil so he could finish his trip. I bought him the gas and oil and told him to get going and get on the job. Then he offered to leave his saddle as security. I told him I didn't need security, "Just send me the money when you get it." And he did.

I've always been that way about my money. I would rather see my money used for home missions than for foreign missions. I like to see results. In the case of foreign missions, I never know how my money is being handled nor what it does for people. To be sure, this man repaid me, but if he had not, I would still prefer home missionary work. That may not be the right att.i.tude, but it's the way I feel.

This new-fangled city living didn't take all the country out of us boys right away. We often went hiking along the creek that runs through the south end of Hamlin. One day we slipped out of our clothes and were swimming in the Orient Lake when a group of women and little kids came to fish in the lake. Boy, I thought we were in trouble for sure this time. But Joel came to the rescue. He always was a smooth talker, and this time it paid off for all of us. He yelled out to them that we were swimming without our swim suits, and if they would go back around the bend, we would be out in about three minutes and then they could come on and fish. They did and all was well.

Soon after we moved to Hamlin we owned an old Dodge car, about a 1918 model. It was probably the one we drove to Gorman, although we did own two other Dodges through the years. Anyway, this old car had so much play in the gears and the differential and the axles that you could let up slowly on the clutch, and when all the slack finally wound out of all the gears, the car would leap forward. And if the motor didn't die, you were off and going.

Our car shed opened to the alley. To get into the shed we had to drive up the alley, circle into the shed and stop the car just before it hit a solid board wall. At least it was a board wall, and we had thought it was solid until Albert proved differently. Anyhow, the wall separated the car from the back yard, which, in turn, connected with the back door of Mama's kitchen. Now, this back yard had within its boundaries a number of clotheslines, a storm cellar and a couple of huge mulberry trees, under which a dozen or so old laying hens reclined in shaded pools of dust and ashes while off duty from producing the better half of many nourishing breakfasts for a bunch of growing kids.

Well, on this particular day, Albert had some reason for wanting to go some place in that old Dodge car. It didn't have a starter; we had to crank it. Albert, being just a small boy, was not big enough to stand out in front of the b.u.mper of the car while he applied the necessary heave and pull to roll the motor over compression. So, as usual, he was standing between the front b.u.mper and the car when things began to happen. The old car was easy to crank. Usually just once over and the engine would start.

And so it was this time-once over and wham! Albert had forgotten to shift it out of low gear. The motor had gotten up pretty good speed by the time all the gears took up the slack and the hind wheels began to push forward. It was a good thing Albert was too little to stand in front of the b.u.mper, it would have crushed both his legs as it went about the business of pushing the entire end out of the shed. It's a fact. The bottom of the wall held in place while all the nails pulled out along the top of the wall. The car simply laid that big solid wall flat in the back yard and then climbed on top of it. It was headed right for the storm cellar when Albert switched off the key.

Now you think I'm fibbing. You wonder, "How did Albert get there to switch off the motor?" It wasn't easy. It took a little agility and a lot of speed, and Albert proved he had plenty of both. When the car began going forward Albert went down and under it. Then in the split-second it took the car to demolish the end of the garage, Albert seized the opportunity to shoot out from under one side of the car, behind the front wheel and before the back wheel got him. Then he leaped up and jumped into the car and stopped it on top of one end of the garage, a couple of clothes line poles, and one very dead old hen. The hen, of course, was a welcome sight on the dining table at our next meal. And Albert was also a welcome sight, sitting there eating his share of the old hen, without a scratch on him.

When we moved to Hamlin the school authorities wanted to put us all back a grade or two. We didn't thrill to that idea, so Earl drove the Old Reo car and we went to Wise Chapel School a-year- and-a-half. It was only five miles and our teacher rode with us and helped pay expenses.

But this country schooling couldn't go on forever. So when we entered Hamlin school I was almost sixteen and they put me back to the seventh grade. And then at Christmas time our teacher got married and quit teaching. She was replaced by a man teacher who was not altogether outstanding in his knowledge of math. I worked some math problems he couldn't work and I taught our cla.s.s at times when the problems were too difficult for him. He seemed to resent this and I am sure it was my fault. I was not well- versed in the art of diplomacy and I didn't know how to go beyond his ability without hurting his pride.

As a result, at the end of that year I learned that I was third in my cla.s.s. We all felt sure a certain little girl would be first. I thought I would be second. But instead, a boy named Jack was salutatorian that year. I didn't really think any more about the matter until the next year when I learned, quite by accident, that the teacher had given the honor to Jack which was rightfully mine. I had made higher grades than he did. No, I didn't hate the teacher for having done that to me, nor did I like him for it. I reasoned that he had just made an honest mistake in figuring our grades. As I said, he was not outstanding in math.

There was only one high school teacher I didn't especially like. She taught Latin. The rule of the school was that an excused absence was not to lower a student's grade. Rather, his grade was to be averaged according to those days he was present, and the exam scores. I constantly made "A" when I was in cla.s.s in spite of the fact that I missed a lot of cla.s.ses while on business ventures for our cla.s.s and for the school. I thought, and some other teachers thought that, if I could make "A in cla.s.s and on tests, while attending cla.s.s only three-fourths of the time, I ought to have an "A" for the course. Instead, I got a "C". Except for that one course, I made B-plus and better throughout my high school years. It wasn't all that bad though, having a "C" in Latin. I knew I was an "A" student and my teacher knew I was an "A" student; I was just a little disappointed not to have an "A" on my report card so my family would know I was an "A" student.

Since we had missed so much schooling because of poverty and because of cotton harvest and because of having attended small country schools, naturally we were all put back a grade or two when we entered Hamlin school. I wasn't the only one. Joel says he was put back a grade so many times, he went through one grade three times making "As" every time. In my Freshman year, I was about the age of many of the Juniors. And because of a lack of material possessions, I found schooling less alluring than it might have been.

So, about the last of November I dropped out of high school and took a job with West Texas Utilities Co. The job t.i.tle was "Night Engineer" and the salary was more than a lot of grown men made. Regardless of the t.i.tle that went with my job, what I really did was make ice at the ice plant at night. Anyway, two years later, with my savings to back me up, I quit my job and reentered Hamlin High School, about the last of November.

By that late date I was a Freshman at age eighteen, finishing my freshman year at nineteen. However, I was not looked down upon, even by the so-called elite. The most respected Seniors welcomed me into their school activities. But I realized my social r.e.t.a.r.dation and stood apart, by my own choice, in certain extracurricular activities.