Requiem For A Friend, Willie Elwood Isaac, 1928--2023

 

Willie Isaac and his new car--Photo by Cakes For You and Roger D. Hicks

My neighbor for the past 30 years was Willie Isaac who lived nearly his entire life on a small hillside farm about a mile and a quarter from my house.  He was born in 1928 and died in 1923 about one month before what would have been his 95th birthday.  Willie and I had known each other ever since I moved to this community in 1992 although we did not become close friends until  after his wife, Flora Cook Isaac, died in October of 2018 after 66 years of marriage.  Willie and I had frequently encountered each other in our home town of West Liberty, Kentucky, at local stores and other public places.  We had always been friendly but not close until a couple of weeks before Flora died and I saw Willie's truck parked in the local ARH Hospital parking lot and inquired if he or his wife were in the hospital.  I visited them there as he stayed by her side during her final hospitalization and transfer to a nursing home where she actually died a few days later.  But I had known for about three or four years that her health was failing and Willie was taking care of her diligently, cleaning the house, mowing the yard, and driving her to her appointments.  He had finally stopped driving a couple of years before his death and, although he had no children, his nephew Jimmie Wireman had selflessly driven him to all his medical appointments, bought his groceries, took him to his bank and to the local utility companies to pay his bills.  Willie had finally stopped mowing his own lawn at about the age of 90 and Jimmy had taken care of that also.  But Willie had continued to maintain contact with his widely diverse group of local friends and extended family until about three weeks before his death. He spent a large part of most days on the telephone talking to his relatives and friends. He had continued to live alone with support from Jimmy and his wife Brenda Smith, and I also assisted him at times with minor tasks once in a while, almost daily contact in person or by phone, and one occasion when I had assisted him in getting back up after a fall in his living room.  Amazingly, until just a few days before his death, Willie had maintained his cognitive capacities and still had conversations with Jimmie, Brenda, and I as we visited him in the hospital during his final three week stay due to kidney failure.  Sadly, Jimmie, who was 79 himself, only lived about 9 months after Willie's death.  But he had managed to complete the job of caring for his uncle's needs before his death. 

Willie Isaac, about 1951--Photo by Willie Isaac & Roger Hicks

Willie and Flora had no children other than a son whom Flora had before they married and adopted to a couple from the area who lived in Ohio and raised him.  After Flora died, Willie continued to live in the little three bedroom brick house he built many years ago and where they had operated a used shoe and clothing business for more than forty years.  As a trained and retired mental health professional, I was worried that Willie would suffer from the grief, loss of socialization, and loneliness which often afflicts the elderly following the death of a long term spouse.  So I had begun to visit him regularly.  It turned out he actually had a fairly large support system for a man his age with no children.  He had two nephews who lived in the area and they visited him regularly as did several members of the church  he attended weekly until he stopped driving.   A previous minister of that church also visited with him frequently until his own untimely death due to suicide.  He had a few friends and a sister who also called him nearly every day to check on him. But that sister also died in July 2021 at the age of 100 almost three years before Willie's death. We had developed a system quite informally where I either visited him or called him at least every day or two. At times, Willie would also call me to remind me of a UK basketball game or some other issue in which he knew I was interested.  Since I knew that he was having regular contact with several others, I didn't always visit or call every day but we stayed closely in touch and I made sure he knew that he was free to call me anytime he might be in need of assistance.  

Willie Isaac, Korea, photo by Willie Isaac & Roger Hicks

Not long ago he brought out a collection of photographs which he and others took during his time in the Korean War in 1950-1952.  He agreed to allow me to post them on this blog although he had never used the internet and didn't have a clear idea of exactly how a blog works.  But his mind was still sharp until shortly before his death.  He loved University of Kentucky basketball, watched every game which was available on his limited plan with Dish Network, and read every issue of "The Cats Pause".  He also maintained subscriptions to the local newspapers in both Morgan and Magoffin counties in Kentucky because he had friends in both counties and lived within sight of the county line.  His memory was well above average for a man his age and he loved to talk about his life, extended family, and his years spent "in the shoe business".  He and Flora had built a little building in the edge of their yard on US 460 and sold used clothing and shoes for over 40 years. Willie would drive as far as Columbus, Ohio, to buy a pickup load of shoes and clothing at a large Goodwill sorting center and also often bought large lots of new shoes from shoe stores which were either reducing unsold stock or going out of business. He also managed at some time during their selling days to buy a used shoe repair machine and also repaired shoes and other leather work both for his own sales and for customers in need of repairs.  He eventually sold the shoe shop equipment to one of his nephews after he and Flora had stopped their selling activity. I actually have met dozens of people in this community who talk about having gotten nearly all their shoes from Willie and Flora as they were growing up. And after I posted this blog post, one person commented on Facebook that he had bought all his shoes for many years from Willie.  And, interestingly, he also said that Willie had cut hair at times and only charged a quarter for a hair cut.  But, in all the time I knew him, Willie never mentioned cutting hair to me.  My first blog post about Willie was primarily about his service in the US Army during the Korean War and the stories Willie had told me about his time in the Army  during the Korean War.  First and foremost, Willie always made a point of saying that he was attached to an engineering unit which built bridges and roads during the war.  He always said "nobody ever fired a shot at me and I never fired a shot at anybody" since the engineering unit he was assigned to was always working behind the front building roads and bridges.  He also talked sometimes about one R & R episode he spent in Japan during his Korean duty but he apparently had no photographs from that trip.  Willie did have a few photographs of other soldiers some of whom he remembered their names and some he did not.  I have added the names he either remembered or wrote on the photos. Some will have to be nameless.  But maybe some of their relatives might recognize them and I will add their names if you recognize a member of your family in his photos and contact me on this blog.  Willie also never mentioned a unit name and number for his engineering unit but a retired Army person I know says that it might have been the 103rd Engineer Regiment.  If you have a definite answer other than this please tell me what it was and I will add that to this post also until we can come up with a more indisputable answer.   

Walter H. Handley, Alabama--Photo by Willie Isaac and Roger Hicks

 

 

 

One of the photographs is of a local man who also was assigned to the same unit and Willie now says that man is dead.  Here is his photograph as identified by Willie. 

Bill Ison, Crockett, KY--Photo by Willie Isaac & Roger Hicks

Willie also loved to tell a story of being classified as a truck driver during his time in Korea.  He said "They told us they were giving us driver education and we were in a classroom for about a half a day.  Then we went out in a parking lot and had to drive a truck around the parking lot one time and they let us go."  Later he says, "One day my sergeant came to me and told me to report to the motor pool.  I asked why do I have to go to the motor pool and the sergeant said 'They need a truck driver and you are a truck driver."   Willie says he told the sergeant, "I'm not a truck driver.  I never drove a truck in my life."  He says the sergeant said, "It says right here you are a truck driver.  It's in your record.  You're a truck driver."  Willie said he reported to the motor pool and they put him in a big truck and told him to drive twenty or thirty miles down a river to pick up supplies.  He said, "I tried to tear the transmission out of the truck on the way there but I couldn't."  He also saidnnb that on the way back to his unit he met two men in a jeep whom the motor pool had sent out looking for him afraid that he had driven the truck into the river.  But when the entire thing was over, Willie was a truck driver and was proud enough of it that he sent the photograph below to his parents with the caption, "This is my truck."  It seems most likely that the truck Willie drove was a 2 1/2 ton truck commonly known as a Deuce And A Half. 

The Truck Willie Drove--Photo by Willie Isaac and Roger Hicks

Being able to survive driving the truck apparently got Willie a promotion since he also sent home a photograph of another soldier driving a jeep and added the caption, "This is the jeep I used to drive."  

"Hauser from Alabama" driving the Jeep Willie used to drive--Photo by Willie Isaac and Roger Hicks

Willie also sent home a few photographs of himself with other soldiers whom he could not name or simply did not write their names on the shots including this one below.  It might be "Hauser from Alabama" since they are standing behind a large flat bed truck.  

Willie Isaac & Baker from Central or Western KY--Photo by Willie Isaac and Roger Hicks

Willie was assigned to a bridge building unit and also took a few photographs of a bridge they were building over an unnamed Korean river including the next two, one with an unnamed soldier in it.  Willie told a story that his unit was getting their water from the river a mile or so below this bridge and "one day after they pumped a truck load of water they found five dead Korean bodies in the water upstream above where they were pumping the water."  He said that he tried to not drink anymore water for several days after that.  He also always said that he hated rice and would never eat it after his time in Korea.  He said that the Korean civilians which worked for the US Army would "roll rice up in balls about the size of a softball and walk around eating that rice all day long.  I couldn't stand to eat rice after seeing that."  One of his favorite foods was boiled chicken feet and as long as he was able to do his own grocery shopping and cooking he would go to Wal Mart and buy multiple packages of fresh chicken feet and freeze them.  At his funeral visitation, several people and I wound up talking and laughing about Willie's love of chicken feet and I was the only one besides the deceased minister who ever admitted to having eaten chicken feet with Willie.  I had actually been present at Willie's one day when that minister was sitting at the kitchen table eating chicken feet.  Honestly, I never really cared for the feet but my mother had eaten them with gusto and I figured I owed her and Willie the one honest effort I made to eat them.  Willie also talked often about how in his young days his family frequently went opossum hunting and ate a lot of opossum which few people eat or hunt today.  Willie also loved turtle and in the first years of our acquaintance while he was still able to clean a turtle I would sometimes catch female common snapping turtles crossing the highway to lay their eggs and catch them and give them to Willie.  He never turned one down until he became too physically weak for the job.  I also love turtle but I hate to clean them so I quit eating them many years ago. 

Bridge Over An Unamed Korean River With An Unnamed Soldier--Photo by Willie Isaac and Roger D. Hicks

The photo below, although unlabeled, is of Willie Isaac in front of what appears to be a mess tent.   Since it is a tent, I have to assume it is also from Korea.  

Willie Isaac In Front Of A Mess Tent--Photo by Willie Isaac and Roger Hicks

When Willie returned from Korea, he spent some time at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and eventually left the Army in 1952. He was discharged from Fort Knox at the end of his hitch. He still had his discharge in a frame hanging in one bedroom of his home until the day of his death.  He also had one photograph of himself in what appeared to be a barracks building at Fort Knox with a friend but did not remember that man's name.  

Willie Isaac and a fellow soldier at Fort Knox 1952--Photo by Willie Isaac and Roger D. Hicks

 

Willie also sent home one photograph from Korea of what he described as "an 8" gun".  Maybe somebody with military experience can tell me exactly what this weapon was called.  

"8 inch gun"--Photo by Willie Isaac and Roger Hicks

 

Despite my fears about Willie after the death of his wife, he managed remarkably well for a nonagenarian widower living alone in Eastern Kentucky.  He did his own laundry until he was past 90 and his nephew Jimmy's wife, Brenda took over that job and also began bringing him home cooked meals regularly, At some time past 90, he got out a small steam cleaner he owned and steam cleaned his carpets.  He also adopted and took care of a stray dog who showed up at his house and ate the food he offered but wouldn't let him touch it.  The dog, a pit bull cross female, seemed to have a serious history of abuse but I have seen her follow Willie in his yard and dart from behind him just close enough to brush a hand in passing.  I also never saw anyone besides Willie ever get close to her before she died. One of Willie's favorite photographs was an old black and white shot of himself and a long dead brother in their yard as boys with a favorite dog from his childhood. He loved dogs but always said he didn't like cats and "never owned a cat in my life".  He drove to church every Sunday as long as he was able and did his regular trips to town for groceries, medical visits, and bill paying in his brand new car he bought a few weeks after his wife Flora was buried.  

 

He loved words and had a strong vocabulary for a relatively uneducated man in Eastern Kentucy and kept several dictionaries.  He had actually returned to high school in the 1940's to graduate as he had promised his mother when he dropped out for a year to follow an older brother to Ohio to work.  It was an incredibly rare event in 1940's Eastern Kentucky for a young male to return to school after having dropped out.  He kept a wooden chair on his back porch which he had built in a high school shop class and given to his father.  He pointed out to me a groove in the right arm of that chair which he said had been made by his father's habit of sitting in the chair smoking his pipe and lighting it with kitchen matches which he always struck on the chair arm in the same spot for many years. He was also proud of having used some of the first pay he ever earned in a regular job to buy his mother her first washing machine.  Shortly after his marriage to Flora, they had ordered on the same order from the Sears and Roebuck catalogue a sewing machine for Flora and a single shot, bolt action rifle for Willie.  He still had the rifle at his death and had killed thousands of squirrels with it on the farm which he inherited from his parents.  

 

To say the least, I think about Willie every day and will miss our friendship as long as I live.  This is a photo of the tombstone which Willie and Flora paid for along with their funerals several  years before Flora's death.  Willie's date of death has not been inscribed on the monument yet but you can bet that Brenda Smith and I will see to that it  gets done sometime soon.  They are buried in a little family cemetery which is located on Willie's family farm and holds the graves of Willie's parents, a few of his siblings, and a lot of his friends and neighbors including a few of my other neighbors in this community who have died since I moved here thirty years ago.  Willie, who owned the cemetery property never refused to allow anyone to be buried on the cemetery and had even allowed some people he knew in Magoffin County to have an unmarried friend of theirs buried on the cemetery.  Sadly, his grave is still only marked with the common metal temporary marker which funeral homes use at the time of a burial.  

 

 

Cratis Williams And I On Traditional Appalachian Children's Games

An earlier post on "Death, Dying, and Funeral Rites In Appalachia" which I wrote about a week ago, based on some of the writing in Cratis Williams' book "Tales From Sacred Wind: Coming Of Age In Appalachia", was one of the most appealing for my readers in quite some time and I promised that I would write a more formal review of the book when I complete it which I promise I will still do.  I haven't completed the book yet but I have encountered another section in it which has prompted me to write it while it is still fresh in my mind.  At the time I wrote these two most recent posts about Cratis Williams, I neglected to mention in either of them that I had written a much earlier post called "Responses To Some Reading Of Cratis Williams" which might also be interesting to some of you.  It is a response to a small pamphlet he wrote about his most important early teacher, William H. Vaughan, who was a primary influence in leading Williams to pursue a career in academia which was not common at the time in Eastern Kentucky. 

Cratis Williams--Photo by The Williams Family

The section in discussion here is called "Appalachian Folkways: At Play" and prompted me to remember many experiences from my own childhood growing up in Knott County in Eastern Kentucky about forty years and fifty miles from Sacred Wind where Cratis Williams spent his childhood.  This section in his book is only about four pages but it contains a lot of excellent reminiscences and reminded me a great deal of my own childhood.  Admittedly, Williams grew up on a dirt road in what were still, essentially, horse and buggy days.  I grew up on Kentucky Route 7, a paved state highway,
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 but still in one of the more remote areas of the Big Sandy River drainage which also takes in Sacred Wind.  But I grew up with a father, Ballard Hicks,  who was sixty-four when I was born and about the same age as Cratis Williams' father.  I was also strongly influenced by my maternal grandparents, Woots and Susie Hicks, who were actually a few years younger than my father.  My mother, Mellie Hicks, was roughly the same age as Cratis Williams' mother so our major cultural influences came from people  who were about the same age who had spent their lives in much the same way.  Both his grandfather and my father ran small country stores for many years.  Both our extended families were primarily subsistence farmers.  In many ways our childhoods were the same although I do admit that I probably grew up under less financial stress than he and his siblings.

In this section of his book, he talks about the games and other forms of amusement he and his siblings and classmates benefited from as children.   Many of those experiences were nearly identical to my own.  My one regret about this section of his book is that he did not write more at length on this topic.  In the days in which we grew up, there were no electrical toys and most of our recreation was comprised of games and amusements which required no money, no extensive use of physical equipment, and no store bought devices.  He discusses attempts to catch wild game as a child and I did that also as a form of amusement more than he did.  For his family, catching wild game was purely a subsistence effort.  He discusses building figure four wooden triggers to set dead falls for small animals which I never learned to do.  He also discusses setting homemade box traps for the same wild game such as opossums, ground hogs, rabbits, and raccoons which I and my peers also did but on a more limited basis.  The box traps we all used were homemade with screen wire and/or wood and I came to know them as Hoover Boxes because they had been so named during the Great Depression by my ancestors and their peers all over America.  Williams also discussed going ground hog, opossum, and racoon hunting.  My father had effectively stopped hunting due to his age by the time I was old enough to go hunting but I did hunt in a limited way as a child with other members of my family and friends. But one of my most pleasant memories of my father when I was a small child, sometime before I was six, he went on what must have been one of his last squirrel hunting trips and brought back a squirrel he had shot just as it was starting to eat a hickory nut which was locked in its mouth still.  I was never an effective shot with a rifle so I never became a shooter who could "bark" a squirrel but I did rabbit hunt sometimes and went coon hunting a few times with other local people.  For those of you who have never heard of "barking" a squirrel, it was a practice used sometimes by expert shots with a twenty-two rifle in which they would not shoot directly at a squirrel on a tree but would judge their shot so that the bullet would strike within a quarter inch or less of the animal's head and kill it with the concussion without leaving a mark on it.  By doing this, the head, in my opinion the most delicious part of a squirrel, was not harmed and you got to eat it all including the tongue and brain.  In early spring, ground hog hunting was common for nearly all boys my age.  All you needed was a dog which would chase and, if necessary, fight a ground hog which is not an easy task for a dog.  If the ground hog made it into the hole,  you could attempt to smoke it out by building a small fire in the mouth of the hole, blowing the smoke into the hole, and the animal would usually come out although sometimes it would be through a second exit from the burrow which nearly all ground dwelling animals have.  Sometimes, even without a dog, you could get a ground hog if you knew where one was denning by either stalking it from fifty yards or so away and shooting it when it came out or digging it out which could sometimes be a lot of work.  It was also common in my childhood for ground hog hunters in early spring to dig out litters of young ground hogs and bottle raise them as pets which Williams does not mention.  My grandparents, well before I was born, had a pet ground hog for several years which I have heard many stories about.  It would live at the house all spring, summer, and most of the fall and then disappear to hibernate for the winter.  For several years, this ground hog whose name I don't remember, would come waddling back home when hibernation ended in early spring.  I also knew several families on Beaver Creek who had, at various times, pet squirrels, raccoons, ground hogs, and flying squirrels.  If you caught any of these animals when they were quite young, they all made good pets.  

Cratis Williams also discussed fishing and gigging along with using either a rifle or a sledge hammer to kill fish through ice in winter.  I fished and gigged all through my childhood but I had never heard of using the concussion of hitting ice with a sledge hammer to kill fish if they were visible.  But I also rarely saw ice thick enough in winter to have done that if I had known about it.  In my opinion, global warming had already become a mild issue in the forty years between my childhood and Williams'.  Williams also discusses a game he and his peers played in the woods which they called "Fox And Hounds".  It was basically a tag or chasing game in which a group of children would choose teams of "Foxes" and "Hounds" and the "Hounds" would chase the "Foxes" and try to catch them.  In my childhood, any game of this nature had just become tag.  Williams also discusses a war game which corresponded to our "Cowboys And Indians" which he and his peers called "Colonials And Redcoats".  I and my peers had already, to a limited extent, been influenced by television and, if that game had ever existed in Knott County as it had in his native Lawrence County, it had just reverted to "Cowboys And Indians".  Williams also discussed having made homemade bows and arrows from small tree branches.  I saw some of this in my childhood and actually knew a family who had a son lose an eye to a homemade arrow which had been shot by one of his friends.  

In the two room school in which I grew up, boys in the fourth through the eighth grades were allowed to go anywhere we wanted to for the hour of lunch so long as we could return to school in time for "Books" to be called to resume class.  Most of us older boys, in that hour, would hit the woods, except for a few who had to run home to eat lunch.  We would climb, run, chase each other, and swing on grape vines which we had cut at the bottom to give us a free end but leave the grapevine still attached to the tree.  We also had a game which we called "Riding Out" young poplars.  The better climbers would climb as high as possible up a young, slim poplar tree until they reached the point where the tree began to lean and eventually get close enough to the ground for the rider to drop off or actually just step off. If you were agile and strong, you could sometimes find a stand of young poplars on a hillside and ride from tree to tree down the hill for quite a distance. But we had one event in this game which effectively put an end to it for a long while.  A neighbor boy older than me was "Riding Out" a young poplar which it turned out had a weak spot near the top.  The tree broke and he fell close to fifteen or twenty feet to the ground and was unconscious for a while.  The other boys carried him back to the school where he was laid on a long table which the first graders used for class and he eventually regained consciousness with some soreness and no long lasting damage.  I also remember one incident in which the boys who were gathering kindling for the coal stoves in the two rooms found a copper head about two or three feet long which was nearly frozen on a cold morning after having crawled out the day before in warmer weather.  They brought the poisonous snake into the classroom and laid it in front of the stove where it thawed out enough to crawl around.  Then somebody picked it up with the coal shovel and threw it back out in the cold where it became stiff again.  The teachers actually allowed us to bring it back into school a couple of times before it was eventually killed as I recall.  I am sure that if teachers in today's world ever allowed children to "Ride Out" young trees or bring poisonous snakes into school they would be immediately fired.  But not one negative word was ever said about either of these events.  To our families, it was just boys being boys.  

Cratis Williams also discusses what he calls "throwing" games which usually involved rocks and says one of his sisters was the best at those amusements. He says they often would throw rocks at lizards and sometimes actually catch sleeping lizards with a small stick and a noose made of skinned, limber tree bark.  By the time I was in school forty years later, we had baseball and basketball with an actual basketball goal on a pole in the school yard.  But our baseball game, which we and many other young Appalachians of the time called "Round Town", was played with bases made of flat rocks and a rubber ball. We rarely had any baseball gloves the rubber ball was much easier than a hard ball to catch.  In the early grades from first to fourth, we boys often played "Cowboys and Indians" in the school yard with a herd of stick horses usually cut from sumac, or "shoemake", trees as Williams and I both grew up calling sumac.  We even took this game to the point that we actually named our best stick horses.   

Interestingly, Cratis Williams does not talk about any kind of board game at all.  By the time of my childhood, we at least had checkers and I suspect he might have also.  But one of the things he reminded me of was a traditional Appalachian Folk board game which my father tried to teach me and I was not interested in enough to bother to learn it which I deeply regret.  That game was called "Fox And Geese" and apparently can be traced back to Europe well before American colonization.  Some experts claim it might actually be Medieval in origin.  The game is played on a board which can be made of anything from tanned animal skin to cardboard to a flat piece of a wide board.  The layout is a cross shaped area which is broken into five smaller areas comprised of the center section and the four wings.  There is only one "Fox" and fifteen geese.  When my father tried to teach me, he had drawn the board on a piece of a cardboard box from our little country store. His geese were white grains of corn and his fox was a red grain.

Fox And Geese Board--Photo by Masters Of Games

I have learned that there are also variations of the game with thirteen, seventeen, or twenty-two geese.  According to the website which I linked above, the game is described this way:  Fox & Geese is a game of inequality. The geese cannot capture the fox but aim, through the benefit of numbers, to hem the fox in so that he cannot move. The objective of the fox, on the other hand, is to capture geese until it becomes impossible for them to trap him. The geese start by occupying all 6 squares of one arm of the cross plus the whole first adjacent row and the two end points of the central row. The fox starts in the middle of the board.  The game of Fox & Geese is played upon a cross shaped board consisting of a 3x3 point square in the middle with four 2 x 3 point areas adjacent to each face of the central square. This makes a total of 33 points. Pieces are allowed to move from one point to another only along lines which join points. Accompanying the board, there should be a single playing piece representing the fox in black or red and 15 white playing pieces representing the geese.  According to the Masters Of Games website cited above, the game is actually considered to have been rooted in medieval times.  I don't know that a mathematician would say that this game is as complicated as chess but you can surely bet that it is more complicated than checkers.  I never learned to play it with my father and I deeply regret having been too young and dumb to have given both of us that joy.  Now, forty-nine years after my father's death, I am considering making my own board, shelling a few grains of corn, and trying to induce my wife to learn it with me.  She has also become fascinated with the game and we intend to try to play it until we get some skill.  The woman who cleans our house is about my age and also remembers the game being played by her father who was about 37 years younger than my father.  I also knew that man before his death a few years ago, visited him numerous times, and regret that I also unknowingly lost a second opportunity to learn "Fox And Geese" from someone who grew up playing it.   

Ballard Hicks, My Father--Photo by Roger D. Hicks

Favorite Stories From My Father, Ballard Hicks, 1887--1971

I tend to believe that I am a pretty good story teller and I know I came by it honestly.  My father, Ballard Hicks, was a wonderful story teller and could talk about any subject, any time, anywhere.  He had been born in the holler of Bruce at Mousie in Knott County Kentucky in 1887 and died in 1971 at the age of 84.  When he was born, Grover Cleveland was president and by the time he died the country was suffering through the Viet Nam War and the crimes of Richard Nixon.  When my father was born, Knott County Kentucky was a toddler of three years old.  Most of the prescription medicines we used even by the time I was born in 1951 were unknown in his time.  Anything as common as a broken bone or appendicitis could kill you.

Ballard Hicks, Photo by Roger D. Hicks

  My father helped hunt wild hogs for winter meat as a teenager with his father, Charlie Hicks, and his brothers, William, Isom, Fair, Elder, and Tim.  They kept mountain cur dogs which were trained to hunt any and all edible animals.  My grandfather kept more than fifty stands of bees most of his life and was said to talk about "his honey, his money, and his old woman".  I suspect he was a story teller too.  My father's family raised, made, hunted, fished, or bartered for 99% of everything they ate, wore, and used in daily life until well into their own adult lives.  Life in the late 19th century was not easy in Knott County Kentucky but I never heard my father or any of his siblings complain about how they grew up and I personally knew six of his nine siblings.  I sincerely wish that I had recorded every story I heard from them and many others I knew from their era instead of assuming I would remember those stories.  But I do remember many of my father's favorite stories and I heard most of them many times until his death when I was twenty.  

Sometime when I was about 8 or 9 years old, Daddy decided it was time for me to learn to swim and took me to Beaver Creek near our house to try to teach me even though he was past 70 at the time.  During this experience, he told me the story of how he learned to swim.  He said that his mother, Elizabeth "Betty" Carpenter Hicks, sent him somewhere on Ball Branch around Mousie where someone operated a grist mill to get a turn of corn ground into meal.  He said the miller had a few other turns of corn to grind before his and he went outside the mill to walk around the mill pond.  During this walk or play session, he said he fell off the mill dam into the pond which was well over his head and he could not swim.  He said he went under the first time and came to the surface without being able to swim.  He went down a second time and when he came up he still was not able to swim.  He said just as he was about to sink for the third time he managed to begin kicking and paddling in a successful manner and made it to the bank alive.  He always said that he could always swim after that incident. I am sure that near drowning incident played a role in his decision to teach me to swim. 

Charley and Betty Hicks and Their Children And Two Grandchildren, Photo by Roger D. Hicks

He also told a couple of other stories about his childhood including one about going fishing with one of his brothers, either Fair or Elder, and they weren't catching anything when the brother noticed some kind of unusual action coming from under the bank and said, "I think there's a big catfish or turtle under there." 

Ballard Hicks, Photo by Roger D. Hicks

Daddy said the brother took off his clothes and dove into the water and a great thrashing and boiling ensued in the creek.  Eventually, his brother came up with his hand in the mouth of a large catfish which Daddy always described as having "made a dish pan full of meat".  He also always said that the catfish had "skunt up my brothers hand and arm way above his wrist". Another of his favorite stories was about a time his father took him and another of the brothers to Jackson with him which would have been a full day's trip through the woods from Bruce.  He said this brother was about 8 or 9 years old and had never been out of the Mousie area.  When they got to Jackson, it had a few blocks of concrete sidewalks and Daddy always said his brother walked along for a while looking at the sidewalks and finally said, "I sure wish I knowed where they got them big flat rocks.  Pa could use some of them to set his bee gums on."  Both my father and I always thought that was a hilarious story.

My Grandparents, Elizabeth "Betty" Carpenter Hicks and Charley Hicks, Photo by Roger D. Hicks

But my personal favorite of all his stories from his childhood was connected to his decision to quit school and go to work as a brakeman on a log wagon when he was only ten years old.  The drivers on log wagons had to give full attention to their team of horses or mules and employers often hired young boys to operate the wagon brake on downhills and to hook and unhook the teams from the wagons and other assorted chores.  His employer in this logging job also owned a country store and all his employees were required to take their pay in "a store order" which required them to accept merchandise instead of money and operated much the same as scrip in coal mining jobs.  When my father got his first "store order", he said he took it home and gave it to his mother to spend on the household.  To his surprise, Grandma Betty took the store order and bought one of his brothers a new mackinaw coat.  Daddy said he made up his mind that "if I'm old enough to work, I'm old enough to spend my own store order".  When he got the "store order" the next week, he took it on Saturday to the store and bought himself a brand new blue serge suit, the first store bought clothes of his life.  Then he went to a local square dance, barn dance, corn shucking or some such event.  As he told the story, he "set on a nail keg all night with a little girl on my lap".   On his way home after the event ended, he realized that he had caught crabs from the little girl.  He said he knew better than to carry crabs into his mother's house and stopped in the yard to holler when he got home, "Hey Ma!  Hey Ma!"  Grandma Betty stepped out on the porch to ask him what he wanted and he said he told her, "Ma, I've caught the body lice."  She told him to fill her wash kettle with water, build a fire under it, and call her again when it was boiling and to stay out of the house.  When the water boiled, Grandma Betty told him to go in the wash house or cellar, take all his clothes off, and throw them out the door to her.  She threw the new blue serge suit in the boiling water and boiled it about an hour to kill the crabs.  Daddy said when the suit got dry it had changed drastically and one leg was about a foot longer than the other and both arms of the suit coat were shrunk horribly.  He would tell that story and laugh and say, "I worked two weeks to wear a blue serge suit one night."  Both of us loved that story and so have most others who have heard it.

My Aunt & Uncle, Ida and Tim Hicks, Photo by Roger D. Hicks

As I said earlier in this post, Daddy and his father and brothers always killed hogs for winter meat at a time when there were no livestock laws and most people's hogs ran wild in the woods.  They would wait for good hog killing weather after a hard freeze came and the crops were in and take two or three of those mountain cur dogs and a rifle and hunt until they had killed enough meat to last through the winter.  He always talked about one of those dogs in particular which he said was the best dog they ever had.  During one of these hog hunts, the dogs cornered a large boar under a rock cliff before they got within shooting range of it.  Before they could kill the hog, it had managed to get a tusk into that good dog whose name I do not remember.  The dog was not killed instantly but was severely wounded in the abdomen.  Daddy said they killed the hog and carried the dog home where my grandmother, who worked as a midwife in the area, attempted to sew up the dog's belly.  But the dog died and was always remembered fondly by my father.

Daddy always said that during his childhood, his father owned a wonderful muzzle loading rifle which could not be beaten for accuracy.  At that time in the mountains, it was common on weekends to hold shooting matches and someone would put out word that there was a match at their farm and men from all over the area would walk in with their guns and compete.  Usually, there was a small entry fee, since money was scarce, and the person in charge would put up a hog, sheep, or cow, as prizes.  The animal would be parceled out over five matches in four quarters plus the hide and tallow.  If more than one person won a quarter, the animal had to be slaughtered on the spot and divided between the winning parties. Sometimes, one of the winners might be able to buy the lesser portions from the others and manage to just lead or drive the animal home. Daddy said he and his brothers could almost always win most matches with the muzzle loader and at one particular match several miles from their home they won all four quarters of a large beef animal but lost the match for the hide and tallow.  He said they tried to buy that portion from the winner who was angry at having lost the majority of the matches and refused to sell his portion.  According to Daddy, they had to slaughter the animal on the spot, give the man the hide and tallow and take turns carrying the four quarters of a large beef home for several miles.

Curtis Hicks, Ballard Hicks, & Hewie Hicks, Photo by Roger D. Hicks

Eventually, he said other men in the area would not shoot against the muzzle loader and it was banned from some matches. So the brothers altered the rifle by sawing part of the stock off and even painting the stock and forearm blue for awhile.  He never said what eventually happened with that muzzle loader; but if I could find it I would give anything to own it.

He always told one story about hunting in the Mousie area with an unnamed friend as an illustration of how tough times were during his younger years.  He said he went rabbit hunting once when he was a young adult with some friend whom he knew had little on which to live.  He said it was a snowy morning and as they were cresting a small rise a red fox trotted over the rise into sight and his friend shot it.  The man immediately turned to my father and said, "Build us a fire, Ballard, while I skin this fox."  Daddy said he thought his friend just wanted to warm up while they were waiting to retrieve the fox hide which he could sell.  But after the man started skinning the fox, he cut out the hind quarters and asked, "Do you want to eat these front quarters, Ballard?  I'm going to brile these hind quarters."  Daddy said he declined to eat any of the fox and waited while his friend broiled and ate the majority of the animal.  He also always told one other story about people in poverty eating unusual animals.  He said he knew a woman in the area who had three or four children and no husband at home.  He said he went to visit there once and the woman had a large kettle of something boiling merrily on the stove.  Daddy asked, "What are you cooking?" and the woman just replied somewhat evasively, "I'm just cooking supper for me and the young'uns."  Eventually, he said he was able to get her to admit what she was cooking.  She had gotten out in the area around her house and caught and cleaned three or four terrapins or box turtles  and was cooking them to eat.  He never ate any of those either.

Another of his favorite stories was about two couples he claimed to have known in his childhood who lived on small, hillside farms not far apart.  Apparently, neither of these couples could get along.  So the story went, the two men eventually agreed to trade wives, farms, and families.  He always swore that the two men simply packed up their personal belongings and walked from house to house on the same day, probably passing in the road, and seemed to live quite amicably for the rest of their lives with the other woman and each other.  I realize that this story is somewhat unsavory in today's world and tends to seriously devalue both women and children.  But my father swore it was true although he never named the people involved if it was true.

My other absolute favorite story from my father was about an incident shortly after he bought a country store near Wayland, Kentucky, quit the coal mines, and became a storekeeper due to the failing health of his first wife, Ora Wicker Hicks,

Ora Wicker Hicks, Ballard Hicks, Earl Wicker, Pearl Wicker, & Orville James Hicks--Photo by Roger D. Hicks

who had been diagnosed with an untreatable neurological condition which her obituary described as "paralysis". Some time shortly after he bought the store and during the time before World War II rationing ended, he bought a truck load of black market lard from a fly by night person who had the fifty pound cans of lard hidden under a covering of square baled hay.  He said the lard sold like wildfire because nobody had ration stamps and the price was reasonable.  But about a week after the lard started selling, Daddy had to pay the devil his due.  When the local cooks got about three or four inches down in each bucket of lard, it turned out that the majority was only beef tallow covered up with nice, creamy pork lard.  He always said that load of lard nearly broke him in the store business but he could still laugh about it.  

My Parents, Ballard and Mellie Hicks, Photo by Roger D. Hicks 

E. Hawk Moore, Old Regular Baptist Preacher & UMWA Activist

Hawk Moore--Photo by UMWA Local 5895

E. Hawk Moore was an Old Regular Baptist preacher, coal miner, and UMWA member and official in UMWA Local 5895 in Wayland Kentucky where he worked for Elkhorn Coal Company for many years and also served as the local's Burial Committeeman for many years.  He was also a close friend of my father, Ballard Hicks, who was also employed by Elkhorn Coal Company for a few years before leaving the mine to buy a country store and care for his terminally ill first wife.  Hawk, as he was always known, lived about a mile up Steele's Creek from my father's store near the head of the hollow and just above the Steele's Creek Church which he served for years as moderator.  Sadly, that church is no longer in existence other than as a rental house.  I apologize for the poor quality of the photo above but it was the only one I could find of Hawk.  It is a detail of a group photo of the Local 5895 officials which is included in the book "Twentieth Anniversary...of Local Union 5895 United Mine Workers Of America 1933-1953" about which I have also written in this blog.  I am also still searching for further biographical information about Hawk above and beyond what is in that book and what I know personally.  Hawk's name also appears regularly in the Minutes of several other Associations of Old Regular Baptists as a delegate as does the name of Clabe Mosley whom I wrote about earlier.  

 

 

I have often seen Hawk's name mentioned in obituaries in the Floyd County Times and I know that the paper's online morgue will contain his obituary which I will quote extensively in a future edit of this blog post.  I believe I will also be able to locate another version of that obituary in the Minutes of The New Salem Association of Old Regular Baptists in the near future.  Although, my father never joined any church, he often attended Old Regular Baptist services with my mother, Mellie Hicks, and knew most of the Old Regular Baptists in the Floyd and Knott County area.  He often traveled to Quicksand Creek in Breathitt County Kentucky to squirrel hunt with Hawk Moore and his son George Moore and a few other men.  They always hunted on the same farm on Quicksand which belonged to some man whose name I do not remember who also was known to make moonshine.  They would travel to Breathitt County to the farm where they were allowed to camp and hunt for as much as a week at a time.  According to my father, part of the deal was that he would always check in with the landowner at his home and inquire as to "where his cow was being pastured".  This was a code phrase which they used so the man would tell them which area of his farm was off limits since that was where his moonshine still was located.  Apparently, the farm was rather large and even with being limited from hunting in one small fork of the hollow or another, they could all still cover plenty ground, kill their limit of squirrels, and avoid interfering with or leaving a trail to the owner's still.  The other part of the deal was that they also bought at least one gallon of moonshine among the lot of them.  I suspect that at times they might have bought several gallons.  For many years until shortly after I was born my father kept a gallon of moonshine in the house for "medicine" but was never a heavy drinker.  

Hawk Moore never drank at all because of his religion but since the other members of the hunting party were able to do so without causing problems he still hunted with them under that setup.  One of my father's favorite stories about hunting with Hawk Moore took place on that farm on Quicksand Creek.  Daddy said he and Hawk were hunting up the same rather narrow, steep, and rocky little hollow one day and Daddy happened to spook a large whitetail buck which was unusual in that time period in Eastern Kentucky.  Hawk was apparently further up the hollow than my father and the deer ran his way.  Both men were hunting with the standard 12 gauge shotguns of the day and probably would not have attempted to kill the deer illegally even if they had been properly equipped.  Daddy said a few seconds after the deer bolted up the narrow, high sided drainage of the hollow he heard Hawk scream something or other like "Whooee!".  Later, he said Hawk said he had been coming down a particularly narrow area of the drainage and the buck nearly ran over him almost literally touching him as the sizeable rack slid past his body.  Hawk was known to make the somewhat humorous claim later that he always believed that my father had been trying to get him killed by driving the deer over him.  They remained friends for life and, as I recall, Daddy made a trip from our new home on Right Beaver Creek to attend Hawk's funeral when he died.  There were also numerous trips through the years between the time we moved from Steele's Creek to Beaver Creek that my parents would hire a driver, since neither of them drove, and travel to Steele's Creek on Sunday to attend the church which was also the church my mother joined.  

I will keep searching for further information about Hawk and edit this post as soon and as extensively as I can. 

"The Nick Adams Stories" by Ernest Hemingway--Book Review

Hemingway, Ernest. The Nick Adams Stories. (New York, NY, Bantam Books, 1972)

This has always been one of my favorite books and this is the second or third time I have read it from cover to cover.  I have probably read a few of the individual short stories in this collection such as "Indian Camp", "Big Two-Hearted River", and "The Last Good Country" a dozen times or more.  This book shows a side of Hemingway that is not the commonly understood man and writer in many ways.  The 24  stories are divided into five sections and arranged in something close to the chronological order in which they were written.  The sections, in order, are called "The Northern Woods", "On His Own", "War", "A Soldier Home", and "Company Of Two".  These sections are intended to present the stories as they fit into the key segments of Hemingway's life and also correspond fairly closely to the order in which they were written.  

The stories in "The Northern Woods" are all set in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the character Nick Adams after whom they are entitled is generally conceded to be primarily an autobiographical presentation of a youthful Hemingway in the home of his father.  "Indian Camp" has always been one of my favorite stories by any writer.  It is direct, brutal but realistic, and shows Hemingway approaching the issue of suicide which was a major family issue with his father, brother, and several other family members either attempting suicide or succeeding in ending their own lives.  The short story tells the story of the doctor, his son, and an uncle attending the birth of a child in the home of a Native American couple in the Upper Peninsula.  The woman's husband is bound to his bed by a recent injury and they  are actually in a set of bunk beds during the childbirth.  At the end of the procedure, the doctor discovers that the father has quietly committed suicide in the upper bunk as his child is being born immediately below him.  The dialogue at the end of the story is some of the most linguistically simple and yet brutally powerful you will ever find by an writer anywhere.  The boy asks, 

"Do many men kill themselves, Daddy?"  

"Not very many, Nick."

"Do many women?"

"Hardly ever."

"Don't they ever?"

"Oh yes. They do sometimes."

"Daddy?"

"Yes."

"Where did Uncle George go?"

"He'll turn up alright."

"Is dying hard, Daddy?"

"No, I think it's pretty easy, Nick.  It all depends." 

When we consider the fact that both Ernest and Clarence Hemingway died by suicide by gunshot, we can almost visualize Ernest Hemingway, in Ketchum, Idaho, in the early morning hours of July 2, 1961, replaying that very dialogue in his mind as he loaded his shotgun to end his life.  I have always suspected that this section of dialogue from "Indian Camp" may well be the most purely autobiographical words Hemingway ever wrote.  But the stories are not all that dark and Nick Adams and his fictional father are not overly dark characters.  Nick Adams love to fish, hunt, drink, and have sex and those are three of the areas of life in which Ernest Hemingway wrote at a level which few writers ever achieve.  Some of the hunting and fishing language in these stories is pure poetry.  the sexual language is totally devoid of all those socially unacceptable locker room words so often found in the work of lesser writers.  But when Hemingway wrote about sex, he did not leave  his readers to wonder what he was talking about.  His meanings are crystal clear.  His language is admirable and accurate.  When he writes about any of these three topics, you know you are reading the work of an individual who has done sufficient homework on his topics to be considered an expert and a connoisseur.

"The Last Good Country" is a fascinating story about Nick Adams on the run from two local game wardens as a teenager in the company of his younger sister who is going with him to protect him from himself and his dangerous tendencies.  They are hiding in the "...last good country..." in the Upper Peninsula with streams full of hungry trout, berries to pick, warm beds of vegetation in which to sleep safely, and far too much country for two fat, liquor loving game wardens to ever find them.  The relationship between the siblings borders on things which most readers would not appreciate and Hemingway never crosses any of the lines which would make the difference for reader.  But he walks directly up to those lines, stares across at his doubting readers, and leaves answers hanging in the air to be considered, doubted, appreciated, and never found in the open.  It is also a wonderful story.  

 "Big Two-Hearted River" is, perhaps, the best known story in this collection but I would not go so far as to declare it flatly the best.  It is a wonderful story and is also one of my favorite stories both from Hemingway and from the greater body of American literature.  It is, on the surface, a fishing story about an isolated section of river which Nick Adams loves to fish in the Upper Peninsula but it also about a soldier returning home from war and remembering his friends in the war.  The fishing sections of the story are some of the best written descriptions of fishing from any writer, anytime, anywhere.  Isaak Walton would have been proud to know this version of Hemingway.  It is also a great story about a solitary person in a very solitary situation in a wilderness.  This story is one of those which no person should ever say they are a well read aficionado of either Ernest Hemingway or American Literature without having read. 

While the Nick Adams stories are not always the first of Hemingway's writing we hear mentioned, they are well crafted, introspective, autobiographical stories by and, at least in part, about a very complicated man.  They are well worth reading and rereading.