The Life of Me - an autobiography Part 19

I was using the truck to haul crossties to the Moffat Tunnel. The ties were to be used in the railroad through the tunnel. The tunnel was eight miles long and would cut 25 miles off the railroad distance through the Rockies. The railroad which served our mill was curved one way or the other just about every foot of its entire length. A 30-car train would have three engines pulling it. And the three engines would not all be at the front end of the train. That would have a tendency to pull the cars off the rails on sharp curves. So, the engines were placed at regular intervals between the cars. Even with all safety precautions we constantly heard of derailments and the loss of freight cars down the mountain sides. The trains had no time schedules; they got there when they could.

I signed on for that lumber mill job at an employment agency in Denver and rode a bus to the mill. Naturally I was not clothed for that cold weather. But the bookkeeper at the mill told me to go to the company store, get what I needed and have it charged. That was before I started to work. That same night, in the bunk house, one man was raving mad because they wouldn't credit him at the company store. He and I had come out on the same bus and were to begin work the next morning. I kept quiet about my credit. I didn't want him mad at me like he was at the company.

One day the foreman told me to go to the tool house and bring him a half-dozen picaroons. Now, I knew how many a half dozen was, but I didn't have the slightest idea what a picaroon looked like nor what it was used for. What's more I was too proud, or too stupid to tell him I didn't know. So I went to the tool house and looked at all the tools. I knew the names of all the tools except one. I took him six of those, hoping they were picaroons. I don't know what I would have done if there had been two kinds of tools I didn't know the names of. Anyhow, he thanked me and I went back to my other work.

In case you may not know, a picaroon is like a single-bladed ax on a regular ax handle, except most of the ax blade is cut away, leaving only a pick instead of a blade. The workman can thrust the pick into the side of a log to roll it over, or he can stab it into the end of a small log and lift the log into a desired place.

Another time, the foreman came to me and asked whether I could handle a horse. Again I could not tell a lie. However, I knew he was speaking of Old Nig, and I also knew it would be a pleasure for me to work for Old Nig.

Now, Old Nig was a black horse, and I'm not sure, but I think his color had something to do with his being named Nig. This horse had won first place in the state one year for his skill in the art of log-skidding. That alone meant that Old Nig was a horse to respect as well as to obey. I had watched a few men work with the horse but had never seen one of them stay with him for long. In fact, Old Nig changed drivers three times one day. He simply wouldn't put up with anyone who cussed him or scolded him. He knew more about the log-skidding business than most of the men he had to put up with. He didn't need anyone to drive him nor try to boss him around. Mostly what Old Nig needed was a man to work for him, to pull his single-tree back when he backed up, so he wouldn't step on it, and he needed a man to hook him onto the next log. He had no hands or he could have done it himself.

If you scolded or cussed Old Nig, he would bite you, if and when he got the chance. Or he might stomp his hind foot and switch his tail just to remind you there was fire in that end of him too. One man who worked with the horse was so afraid he might say the wrong thing to him that he put a rein on his bridle and led him around all day without saying anything to him.

So, when they put me with Old Nig, I already knew more about the horse than I did about log-skidding. We got along well together. What I didn't know about the job, he did. I just talked to Old Nig as I would talk to you; that is, I would be as kind to you as I was to Old Nig as long as you did your work as well as he did his. I didn't care whether he had a bridle on or not. I didn't need to lead him nor drive him. He knew where to go and what to do. And without a bridle, he could see better how to do his work. I would tell the horse when to back up another few inches and when to get over to the right or to the left. Princ.i.p.ally I was his hooker-upper and his unhooker.

One day we were sorting a pile of logs, skidding the small ones over by a pile of other small ones, the medium size ones by a pile of medium ones and so on. But there was not a pile of large ones on the yard. So I hooked Old Nig to a large log and told him I'd have to find out where to put it. Then I went to the office and asked the foreman where to put the big logs. In the meantime, the horse took the log to the proper place but I didn't know it. He was already standing there waiting for me to unhook him from it. The foreman came to the door, pointed, and said, "Put it up there where Old Nig took it. He knows where."

Thanksgiving came and went, and the sawmill changed owners. The foreman told me that the new owner thought he could run the mill with fewer workers. I was laid off. However, he was sure that, if I wanted to stay around a week or two, they would need me. He also told me that, if I wanted to leave, I had better go right away because that place was often s...o...b..und by this time of the year and there was no way out until next spring. So again I landed back in Hamlin with a little more knowledge of the outside world and perhaps just a wee bit more understanding. I got a job in Hamlin and soon paid Papa back the $22 he had wired me for a railroad ticket home from Denver.

Papa was always kind to me in spite of all my failures and my goings and comings. I respected him for it and was proud of him. I was proud of Mama too, but there was an unspoken mutual feeling of trust and regard between Papa and me that reached beyond the bounds of a boy's expectations. The following poem which I wrote while I was in Denver, expresses, in some small measure, my feelings toward my father.

Daddy, if the Lord had made you A companion fit for me, If He'd made you n.o.ble minded, As I think a man should be, If He'd given you a courage And a will to fight and win, If He'd made your life a great one From beginning to the end, If He'd made you with integrity Higher than the highest star, Then He would have made you, Daddy, Just exactly as you are.

CHAPTER 14

HAUL MAIZE, REPAIR TRUCKS, TURN TRUCKS OVER

While I was running around I was getting a lot of experience, some knowledge, and perhaps a little wisdom. But I didn't seem to be getting rid of all my stupidity. Perhaps stupid is not the word to use here. I don't really believe I was a stupid kid. But let's just say I was a normal boy who did stupid things at times.

Anyway, when I look back on some of those things I did in my younger days, as well as some in my older days, it causes me to be a little more lenient with youngsters these days who sometimes do things without thinking. I have not always taken time to look back on my own mistakes

For instance, after I was old enough to hitch a team to a wagon and haul cottonseed from the Neinda gin to the oilmill at Hamlin, I was still not smart enough to cover up all my crazy deeds.

What did I do this time? Nothing much, really.

I remember once one of my brothers and I bought a big box of matches in Neinda and lighted the weeds and gra.s.s along the fence rows from there almost to Hamlin. We would strike the matches and throw them into the gra.s.s and weeds. It's a wonder we didn't set our load of cottonseed on fire. It was after dark and the fires made beautiful fireworks. We even wondered why farmers didn't do this more often. We thought we were really doing them a favor, cleaning up their fence row. And it was a lot of fun.

"And with all thy getting, get understanding." Well, we got some understanding when a farmer drove up beside our wagon in his car, and very politely explained that he realized we boys had not thought about the fence posts we were burning and the wires we were damaging by heating them too much. Then he added that he knew our daddy, and he knew that Papa wouldn't want us to do what we were doing. Then he promised not to tell Papa, if we wouldn't set any more fires.

He was right; we hadn't thought of the damage we were doing. We were sorry, of course. And we certainly didn't want to do anything that would reflect on Papa and the family's good name. Nor did we want Papa to know what we had done. I guess he never found out or he would have said something to us about it.

While we lived in Hamlin, Papa had an old farm twelve miles northwest of town. The field was covered in Johnson gra.s.s and we tried to help the gra.s.s grow by plowing the field every year. We had a breaking plow, a mowing machine, a hay rake and a hay baler, all horse-drawn. We baled the hay and stored it to sell in winter when it would bring a better price. There was an old rundown house on the farm. I went out to plow the field at times and I slept in the house rather than drive back and forth to Hamlin. There were no near neighbors. It was way, way out, and staying there at night proved to be challenging and quite scary.

The doors of the old house were only half there-sagging, splintered, and broken, and the windows were all broken out.

Noises jumped out at me from every dark corner. The silence seemed to amplify every noise. Mice sounded like jungle beasts and packrats made loud noises like goats playing on the roof. Daybreak was always welcome, melting the darkness and pushing back the veil of fear.

The warehouse which my brother Earl still uses as a freight depot was originally built for hay storage. In haying season we baled the hay and hauled it to that hay barn. In the hay field, we usually had, among other things, canned pork and beans for dinner. Once in awhile we had pork and beans at home for a meal, but Albert said they didn't taste good unless he was sitting on a bale of hay.

Papa also had another farm twelve miles south of Hamlin, in deep shinnery sand. I'm not sure how he got hold of it nor why he owned it. I think he had to take it in on a land deal of some sort in order to get the other party to take something off his hands that he had and didn't want. Now he had a sandy farm on his hands that he couldn't use and didn't want. There wasn't much of anything of value on the land-a rundown peach orchard and a half-dugout. There was a dug well by the house four feet across and 60 feet deep. There was never any water in it, but 100 yards away out in the orchard was another well about three feet deep with water standing within a foot of the top of the ground. There was no cover over it; you just walked up and dipped a bucket of water any time you wanted it. And when you were not dipping, the cows and horses could drink from it.

In the early 1920's many of our inter-city buses were marked with well-painted names, such as MISS DALLAS or MISS ABILENE. Well, I had a Model T Ford touring car and I thought I might just as well join the parade. First I got a set of good used tires off a big Buick. They were about four sizes too big for the Ford, but I put them on anyway. And with only ten pounds of air in the tires, it rode very smoothly and it looked like a clubfooted horse.

Then I cut the top down small to cover only the back seat. And I put a windshield on the back of the front seat. That made two windshields, one in front of the driver and one in front of the pa.s.sengers in the back seat. It made a beautiful limousine, with the driver sitting out in the sun and weather. To top it all off I painted her name on both front doors-MISS FORTUNE. Of course we kids had a million dollars worth of fun with it.

After we Johnsons got a little money ahead, we made some improvements on our house. For one thing, we added a long back porch, all gla.s.sed-in with windows the entire length of it. Then we added a bathroom with all the fixtures. And on the back porch we put a lavatory to wash our face and hands in, when the bathroom door happened to be locked. Sometimes we kids would come in to wash up after unloading a load of hay, and when two or three of us were using the lavatory at the same time, one of us might casually flip a few drops of water in another one's face. Now that usually called for retaliation, which took place immediately. And that in turn called for counter-retaliation with a lot more than just a few drops of water-perhaps a big handful and then a cupful.

By this time we usually heard from Mama from wherever she happened to be, as she shouted, "Stop that." And if she came out to enforce her command, she might get some of the same. Of course Mama knew what she would get into, and I really think she wanted into it. She only pretended she wanted us to stop. It made it funnier that way and it relieved her of the responsibility for having instigated the action. Mama had running water in the kitchen which was just as wet as the water we had on the porch and there was a 50-50 chance that she had some already drawn up in a stew pan. So when she said, "Stop it," she may as well have said, "Stop it after we all get wet." We usually ended up being as wet as if we had jumped in the lake, and everyone laughing.

This was the age of cars and we had our share of them through the years. The same old Dodge that ran over Albert and killed the hen for supper had a magneto that kept giving trouble, and it cost a fortune to have it repaired each time. This was before I had learned much about cars. In fact, this old car taught me a lot about other cars to come.

The car had a battery. So, I thought I could use Model T coils to make the spark and use the mag as a distributor. That would be less expensive than trying to keep the mag in repair. I got it all rigged up and it worked some, but it was not a success. The battery didn't fire the Model T coils well enough. That was another one of my ideas I flunked out on.

There was a farm family in our neighborhood by the name of Owen. And in that family was a boy named Bill. My brother Frank ran around quite a bit with Bill. Pretty soon Bill's sister, Mattie, got to running around with Frank. Bill had a younger brother named Joe, and I got to running around with Joe. To complicate things still further, Joe had a younger sister named Faye, and she got to running around with me. That seems like a lot of running around for just a few kids, but it happens that way sometimes.

One day I was out on the farm visiting with Joe, and now and then I was glancing in the direction of Faye when Joe and I discovered Frank's trunk in Mattie's bedroom, which was quite all right since Frank and Mattie were married by this time.

Joe and I knew that Frank kept a 45 revolver in the bottom of his trunk. We also knew that Frank and Mattie were not home that day. Faye and her parents were home but they didn't know that Joe and I were prowling in Frank's trunk. We were whispering and tiptoeing.

We took the 45 and a bunch of sh.e.l.ls and slipped off out into the pasture to shoot something. A gallon can was the only thing that would sit still for us, so we fired at it. We tried and tried but decided we must be too far away; we never did hit it. I had thought that a 45 would shoot as far as six or eight steps, but I guess not. Or it could be we missed because the gun kept kicking up at the front end every time we pulled the trigger.

Anyway, we didn't know that Frank had returned home and we were so wrapped up in our target practice that we didn't see him until he was right upon us. Then it was too late to run. And for one time in my life I couldn't think of anything to say. We just stood there in surprise, prepared for the worst. Then we got a bigger surprise. Frank walked up to us and said, "There are plenty of sh.e.l.ls in the bottom of my trunk when you run out." And with that, he gave us a few pointers on firing a pistol and walked away.

Before Papa got his freight line from Hamlin to Stamford, he had one truck and was looking for anything to haul that would help us make a living. He took one job of hauling that shouldn't happen to a dog. There was a man buying maize heads one summer and shipping them by rail to somewhere. This was the surplus maize farmers had left from last year's crop, after they had used all they needed for feed through the winter and spring. The man bought the maize from farmers and then told us where to go pick it up. Then we hauled it from the farms and loaded it into railroad boxcars.

You may not know it, but each and every maize seed has a little stinger on it. These stingers are bad enough when you get the heads out of the field in the fall and fork them into a storage bin. In the fall you are working most of the time out in the open air. But when that feed lies in storage all winter, it dries out month after month and it collects dust from West Texas weather and from the grains themselves where mice, rats, and birds have eaten, slept and roosted. And then, when you load it into a truck, you have to get in the storage bin, under a sheet metal roof, with a blazing sun bearing down on the roof. And each little stinger on each grain is harder and more brittle than it was in the fall, and all these stingers break off the seeds more easily, more of them mix in with the dust, and they get into your eyes, your nose, down your collar and lodge in the wrinkles of your stomach, and they get in under your arms and around the tops of your shoes and they dig into your ankles. Eventually, there is not any place on your body that doesn't sting and itch. What's more, the stinging and itching goes on after a bath. Now I believe you will agree with me-it shouldn't happen to a dog. When you have a job like that, you hate it, you detest it, and you dread having to face it the next day. But you do it, and you keep on doing it until the job is finished, because you like to eat, and the job pays money and you have to earn money in order to eat.

Do you get the picture? Well, wait a minute, I'm only half through. We have yet to haul the maize to the railroad car, fork it into the car, then get into the car and pitch it all the way back to both ends and all the way to the ceiling. Did you ever work in a boxcar on a hot day in summertime? You choke on dust, you sweat, and each and every drop of sweat becomes a parking lot for dust and maize stingers that show no mercy.

Of course it helps to get home after a day of such torture and get a good bath. But some of the cars we loaded were in Roby. After a day of agony, we had to drive 22 miles over rough, crooked roads in a slow truck before we could get a bath.

In war, I have heard of torturing prisoners to get information from them. I have often wondered if they have thought of trying the maize-torture treatment.

There were other better jobs of course. One of my first jobs on Sat.u.r.days during my school years, aside from working for Papa, was in a grocery store. Mr. Gay was operating the Farm Bureau store. He offered me a job and I took it.

Come Sat.u.r.day morning, Mr. Gay put me to sacking up beans, peas and potatoes in paper bags, getting them ready to sell. During the day we ran out of one item and a customer asked me where he would find another grocery store. I told him, but when the rush was over and we were alone, Mr. Gay told me never to send a customer to our compet.i.tor. He said tell them to try the drug store up on the corner. Then he added, "And if we run out of coffee, sell them split peas."

At the end of that first Sat.u.r.day Mr. Gay paid me three dollars. I told him that was twice as much as he had offered me. He said he had fired two boys he was paying $1.50 each and that I did more work than both of them together. He paid me three dollars a day all the time I worked for him.

Another job in my younger days was working at Hudson's Filling Station for Sox and Red Hudson. The pay was ten cents an hour- keep my own time and pay myself from the cash register every Sat.u.r.day night.

We did some overhauls and a lot of tune-up work. One farmer had a Model T Ford that had a weak magneto. It would run only on the battery and Fords didn't run good except on mag. He needed $21 for a motor overhaul. But he was a poor boy and didn't have that kind of money. So I asked him if I might take a look at his coil points. He told me I couldn't do them any good, he had just come from the Ford garage where a mechanic had adjusted them. But Sox told him, "Let Clarence look at them, he won't do them any harm."

Now, the Ford mechanic only knew how to set the points for a strong magneto, and this mag was weak. I knew that a weak mag needed a weak diet, so I adjusted his points so that a weak mag would fire them. Fifteen minutes later the man drove away with his car running like a new one-on the magneto. A year later he was still running on the mag and had not had the motor overhauled. What did we charge the man? Nothing. He was a regular customer, and we did little things like that for our customers.

Speaking of repairing, one night I was driving a truck from Ft. Worth to Hamlin. The rotor in the distributor was a slip-on thing made of bakelite. I knew it was cracked but it was still working well. However, before I got home it broke into a lot of little pieces so small there was no way to use any part of it. It happened at night and caught me without a flashlight, way out in the country between towns. Working in the dark, feeling my way, I wrapped adhesive tape all over the upper end of the shaft. Then I stuck part of a safety pin through the tape to what I thought was about the right distance, and it worked. It gave no more trouble all the way home.

For some reason that same truck kept burning out bearings in the back connecting rod. Each time it happened, it cost $26 to have a mechanic repair it. The next time it burned out, I asked Papa to let me repair it. I figured there had to be a reason for this continuing trouble, and it seemed that mechanics were not hunting the cause, but were only replacing the bearing each time. I had been thinking about the thing and I sort of figured I knew what was wrong, and I thought I knew more than the general run of mechanics. But Earl told Papa not to let me try repairing it. He said, "Clarence is not a mechanic; he can't do that job."

And Papa told him, "It looks like the ones who have been trying it are not mechanics either. At least it won't cost me $26."

So Papa let me do the repair work, and that was the last time that bearing ever gave trouble. We drove the old truck for years and then sold it to Calvin Carriker for a farm truck. The bearing lasted the life of the truck, and unless someone looked in after the truck was junked, no one knows how I remedied the problem. I can't help it if I'm smarter than the average mechanic-and Earl.