Bill Hill

Partial Transcript: Well, I’m William Hill. I’m eighty-four years old, lucky I’ve lived this long I think. No, I think God is in—leading me and guiding me and taking care of me. I’ve enjoyed life quite a bit, and all phases of my life from the time when I was a baby and I could start walking. I can remember some of those times all the way up to now I’m beginning to forget some of them. But I enjoy life.

Partial Transcript: Well, I’ve got a nephew lives right over past you, over there, and he’s like my son. His dad got killed when he was ten years old, and his mother couldn’t handle him. And I think it’s because he wanted to live with me and my wife. But we took him, and he’s been a very good son for me. He’s not into trouble. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t smoke. He doesn’t chew. And he works. He loves to work—always working, and I’ve always been that way. I find something to do, and I enjoy work. I wish I could work more now, but I’ve about had it.

Partial Transcript: Well really I’m not from the mountains. I’ve been here most of my life, but I was born south of here. A county that—part of it came from this county, and part of it came from Rutherford County. And it’s called Polk County. So you get a beautiful view of the mountains from most places in Polk County. And my grandfather, as far back as I can trace, he had a twin brother. I’ve not tried to trace it really, but he had a twin brother, and they were around Landrum. Most of them were around Landrum, South Carolina. And my grandfather lived in North Carolina in Tryon, and that’s where my mother was born. My brother and I were born in Polk County, and I went into service within the Air Force and spent four years. When I got out, I didn’t like what I found down there. I didn’t like the work I found down there, and so I moved up here when General Electric came in, and I got a job with General Electric and moved up here in 1959. So most of my life spent here. My grandfather on my daddy’s side, as far back as I can—I knew he had a resident farm in Henderson County. But he moved to Polk County down in Green River Cove, and he farmed and raised apples and corn and turned his corn into whiskey. And he hauled it to Spartanburg in a team and a wagon, and he hauled his apples, and he hauled corn. He had the wagon fixed so he had a hole so he could reach up and turn the whiskey on and get how much anybody wanted. He always hauled corn stalks, which they called the tops. He hauled them over the barrel of whiskey. But my daddy hated that, and my granddaddy didn’t want him to have an education. But Daddy would be tending the fire at the still, and he’d get things going to where he thought it’d hold, and he’d run to school. He was about a mile from school, and he’d run and stay a while to learn something. He finally made it through the third grade, but he took a lot of beatings for it. Granddaddy’d catch him away from the still or he’d scorch mash, get it too hot, and Granddaddy’d beat him with a stick, not a switch. He had it rough, but he hated whiskey making. He never made any when he got on his own.

Partial Transcript: My granddaddy never taught anything about making—never. My dad did. He’s the one that told me about it. And then we lived at a place called Pea Ridge, and that was the most whiskey made on Pea Ridge or around Pea Ridge, and that covers several miles. Most of the little branches of a stream would have a still on it, and the feds got after one, and they ran the men hard—run, run. They ran down the stream, and it ran over into another still. They didn’t know it was there. And they were—the men were there, and they hollered, “Run boys! The law’s comin’!” That’s the only time that I ever heard of two stills being on one stream, and it was probably close to a mile from the road, and they had to carry all that stuff in—the sugar—I mean, at that time, they made it out of all kind of grain ground up.

Partial Transcript: Well, one of ‘em, my mother’s mother, stayed in the house all the time. She seldom got out. And my granddaddy would go buy the groceries for her. She’d tell him what she wanted, and he’d go to town and buy ‘em and bring ‘em back, but she just stayed in the house. But she was a cook. Boy was she a cook. She’d cook what they’d call 0:11:53.8 (s/l chatty) and biscuits. She’d pull off a chunk of dough and roll it and then mash it down, throw it in the pan. And it would be probably four or five inches across, and boy they were good. It was all you could eat one of ‘em. (laughs) But she could cook chicken like nobody ever saw. That’s the most delicious chicken. We didn’t have ‘em very often, but we’d get invited and she’d have a chicken.

Partial Transcript: Well yes, they’d buy cloth. Now I had a great-grandmother that made her own cloth. I was very small and she had me holding the hanks in my hands, and she’d roll ‘em off on a spinning wheel and spin it, which twisted the flax and wool. But she made her own cloth and the clothes.

Partial Transcript: Yeah, yes. Had their own sheep. Now my great-grandmother, great-grandfather was—I guess you’d call him a judge or a justice of the peace, I guess, is the closest thing it’d be now. But they called him squire, and I think squire stood for something similar to a justice of the peace, because he tried people, and he would—minor things. For a major crime or something, you’d have court and all, but just like they do today. But that was far apart. They seldom had court. People would have to stay in jail a long time unless they could make bail until the court met. Once a year, I believe, they had court, and I think now they have it every day except holidays and weekends.

Partial Transcript: Not really, just case where people’d get in an argument on whose cow it was—whose cow and stuff like that. And get on people for not paying their debts and threaten to throw ‘em in jail unless they paid. He’d make arrangements for amounts that they would pay each week or each month, so they could pay it off if they wanted to.

Partial Transcript: Well, my brother and I went to church, but none of the rest of the family went. We’d go to Sunday School. And then later we moved and went to church, and we—I can remember when I was very small, this lady that had taught Daddy in school was the Sunday School teacher for the small children. And we had little cards—little folded cards—that had a picture on it of something that she would teach us, and we could see a picture like King David and Goliath and Jesus and a boat and highways and things. It’d be pictures like that, and then sometimes maybe we’d have a small rim on it and just different things to get your attention. And then on the inside, it was printed a story, and she’d read it to us and ask us if we understood it. But at that time, I couldn’t read. I was four or five years old, but we enjoyed it. In fact, we enjoyed a lot of things then that you couldn’t think of enjoying now. Just running—just play out, running, and sometimes we’d run to church or run home. We lived about a mile from where the church was, and most—well, we just about walked every place we went. We didn’t have a car when I was that small, but we just enjoyed getting out. Sometimes we’d walk up 0:19:56.5 (s/l Salva) Mountain and look for different animals, look for squirrels. We saw a bobcat one time, and we backed away from it. Those things are—some people say they won’t jump a man or a little kid. I know they will. But I wouldn’t run from it. We’d back away and try to find something—a stick of some kind or—but we didn’t often do that.

Partial Transcript: Climb trees, go out on limbs and make ‘em bend over. We’d get close enough to the ground and drop off. Pine trees was a favorite. You can bend a whole pine tree over if it wasn’t too large. And one of the best, most fun—you’d climb the pines in a pine thicket, and you’d swing so you’d get close to grab the other one and see how far you could go without coming back to the ground. That was one of the most fun things that I enjoyed. Well, I was pretty good at it. We’d play kick the can. We’d find a can, and we’d cut us a stick to use to bat it with. And you’d set it up and hit it as hard as you could hit it, and then you’d see how many steps it takes to get to that can, and you’d say how many steps. Well, you better be sure you can do it and let somebody else try to do it, but if you couldn’t do it, you lose. If they couldn’t do it and you couldn’t do it, then you lose. But if you could do it, you won, and they couldn’t. We’d take turns about—that was—well, another thing called kicking the can. If you didn’t have a stick, you’d kick it and see how many steps it’d take to get to it—guess how many times, how many steps. But we always found something to do.

And another one of the things I liked best for summertime—go swimming. And we lived, one time, on a river. Boy, I had more fun on that river, and I learned more. I learned how to fish. My dad would say, “Well it’s rained.” A real hard rain got the river muddy. We’d get out, did some worms, take our fishing poles, and go, and we’d catch fish! Boy, they’d bite. With that muddy water, catfish would really bite. In clear water, the perch or sunfish, some people call it, would bite good worms. But the best bait for those is the little grub worm. They love them. And wasp nests—the little worms in wasp nests. We’d tear the wasp nest down and use the little wasps inside for bait. Boy they’d—you could really catch a string of fish.

Partial Transcript: Yes, yes. There was cane growing different places on the river, and we’d cut that. If I was in too big of a rush, I’d find me a tree that had a slim limb on it, cut that, and trim the brush off it—use that rather than going hunting a cane. Bad to lose cane too.

Partial Transcript: A regular hook. The first hook I used, my daddy made it. He took a straight pin and bent the thing, and the very tip of the hook of the pin, he made it curve back a little bit. And it did pretty good as long as you kept it tight. If you didn’t keep it tight, the fish was gone. But that was the first hook I had. But then I was able to buy a hook. They was like a penny a piece. And I’d buy a hook, and I used a little nut that goes on a small screw, you know? I’d use a nut off that, tie that on for a sinker. I had it made boy, something like that. And I have used small stones and tie ‘em on for a sinker. And good sewing thread for the line.

Partial Transcript: My dad and my mother would cook the fish. I was only—about that time when I did the most fishing, I was about eight or nine to about fourteen when I did the most fishing. I was a kid. But I’d also get salamanders, and boy did catfish love them! You’d catch a catfish, oh, usually ten or twelve inches on up—well, I’ve caught ‘em sixteen. And a sixteen-inch catfish will weigh three pounds unless something’s wrong with it—right on three pounds. We could have took the little sunfish and cut the meat from it and leave the skin on it and use that to fish with. That’d do the job too. They’d think it was a small minnow. They’d bite.

Partial Transcript: Oh well, not many. We had a cow one time, and I learned to milk the cow. But we traded for—my daddy traded for—he did not know it, but that cow had had pneumonia. She lived about a year and a half, and she got pneumonia again. We did everything we could, but we couldn’t save her. She died. But that was the best cow I ever saw. Our neighbors—we kept the milk in a spring where we used the water from too, but she had almost half cream. And our neighbors said that we kept the cream and drank the milk without cream. So we showed ‘em. Go ahead. Come over and milk the cow, and strain the milk and put it in big jars. We had gallon jars that we kept milk in. We took it to the spring and put the lid on, of course, set it in—we had a box to let water run through, and we kept it in that. We went back to the house and visited a while, and in a couple of hours, we went back down there, and there it was almost half cream. Never saw a cow like that. It was a Jersey, big, red cow. Boy, that milk was so good. But yeah, I wish we’d of traded for a different cow.

Partial Transcript: Anything he could find to do. He’d do anything. He—doing—well in the thirties and early forties, he’d cut wood for people. He’d cut wood—their wood or our wood—and cut it just the way they wanted it. We’d have to buy everything. We had moved to a farm, and we couldn’t buy a mule. The government was loaning people money to buy mules at that time, but my daddy had the wrong politics, so he couldn’t get a mule. They were always out of mules. They was out of money. Other people were getting mules. Daddy couldn’t get one. And finally he got enough—one of his cousins had a mule that didn’t match, and he wanted a pair, so they let Daddy have that mule for fifteen dollars, and they got a mule to match the one that they had so they’d have a match so they’d pull the same. The mule we got was larger than the one they had to pull, and that mule would pull the most. But it was a good mule except it was club-footed. You know how a horse or a mule’s feet go out, and they go out? Well, this one was back in, straight down from the leg rather than being out. But it could pull. Except for looks, it was as good as any. And we plowed that mule quite a while.

Partial Transcript: Oh, corn, beans, peas. Field peas are—some people call ‘em cow peas. There’s Crowder peas, and I don’t know where the name Crowder peas comes from. I’ll throw this in. You take dry field peas or almost dry and a cow will eat ‘em, and they’ll swell up, and it will kill ‘em. That happened to me here. (laughs) But that mule made—I guess it must have been about a ten-acre field. We grew corn, and then on the upland—that was the bottomland. On the upland, we’d grown beans and peas and sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes. We’d eat well.

Partial Transcript: Very little. Everybody was raising that could, and there wasn’t—if somebody’d come by, we might give ‘em some, but I don’t remember ‘em selling any. Yeah, there was watermelons. We grew watermelons, and everybody liked watermelon. (laughs)

Partial Transcript: Yeah, one place—one place I did. But the main place where we farmed, we had a room under the house that didn’t go below ground, and it really didn’t do—wasn’t that good. It wouldn’t keep that good. But we raised turnips too, and those you could keep. We’d pile up sawdust—get sawdust and pile up over ‘em. Now, until we got the sawdust, we’d been using sand from the river and put ‘em in the sand and cover ‘em. But they’d keep all winter.

Partial Transcript: Oh yeah. Something else, there was blackberries. Oh, we’d can blackberries—wow! And the muscadines. We’d—when we lived on a river, a lot of muscadines climbed the trees that hung out over the river, and we’d take a sheet and hold the corners of the sheet and get under the vine. Now I’d climb the tree and jerk the vine and all over the river, and boy, they’d just pour off. You’d get gallons.

Partial Transcript: Made jelly. We had a lot of jelly. And I made a little bit of wine once with it, but I didn’t know what I was doing. You can find old whiskey bottles that people threw away, and we had found some. And my brother and I cleaned ‘em up good. Then my mom put boiling water in, scalded ‘em good, and we put some muscadine juice in there with some sugar and tightened—tight on the—put a cap tight on the bottle. Guess what? They broke the bottles. (laughs) But I made some muscadine—I mean some blackberry wine once, and our churn—our cow had died, so we had a churn we didn’t use. So I put three gallons of muscadine—excuse me—blackberries in there, mashed them up good, and I poured three cups of sugar in, put a cloth over the top of it and buried it in a sawdust pile and had about that much sawdust over the top of it. About a week later, I went down and I opened it up, and boy was it working. So I went ahead and I took it out, carried it to the house, and I strained all the seeds out. Then I added another cup of sugar in it. I carried it back, just the juice itself, put it back in the sawdust pile. And I went back in a week, and it was bubblin’, bubblin’, so I just poured another cup of sugar in it, put it back in. A week later I went back and it was still bubblin’, so I took it out and carried it to the house and strained it, because there was a lot of stuff built up on it. I strained that off, poured some more sugar in it. That time I think I poured two cups in it and carried it back and buried it in a sawdust pile. Something—maybe a couple weeks—I opened it about a week and then I just let it work. It just kept—it was still bubblin’, and I just covered it back over another week. I got in and it kind of stopped bubblin’, and I carried it to the house and strained it again and poured another cup of sugar in it and carried it back and put it in. And it started bubblin’, and when I opened it again, about three days, or four or something—it was less than a week—it was bubblin’. I covered it over, and I finally gave up on it and carried it to the house, and my daddy tasted it. He said, “Boy, that’s got kick!” And he wanted to know how I made it, and I told him. He said, “Well, you did a good job.” (laughs) But I couldn’t drink it. It was so strong I could not drink it, but I could put a little in a glass and finish filling it with water, and it was really good. Excellent.

Some fellas came. They were drinking, and they were in the river singing in the river. And I went down and told ‘em—I said, “You know, it’s against the law to sing in the river.” They said, “Where’s the law?” Well, and before you knew it, I was in there with ‘em (laughs) watching ‘em. I could see what they were doing. I thought I might want to sing, but the only thing I saw were minnows to fish with. But that’s something else I did. But anyway, they asked me if I knew where they could get some whiskey. I said, “There’s none around here. Nobody around here has any. You’ll have to go to Pea Ridge to get it.” They said, “Well, we won’t do that.” I said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ve got a quart of wine left, blackberry wine.” And they said, “What would you take for it?” I said, “I’ll take a quarter for it.” So they come out with a quarter, and I went and got the quart of wine and they started drinking that, and they said that’s the best wine. “You got anymore?” I said, “No, that was it.” They said, “Well, in case you can find another quart, we’ll give you a dollar for it.” I said, “Well, give me fifty cents for that.” They wouldn’t do it. A deal’s a deal. (laughs) But when they left they went in one ditch to the other ditch. They could not keep that car on the road. I think the car must have gotten drunk too.

Partial Transcript: He was a Republican. He didn’t like big government, and I guess he didn’t like the government taking the money that people earned. But he didn’t like a big government. He said, “The less government is the better government. If you’ve got a small government, they won’t interfere with your freedom. But if you’ve got a big government, they’ll start telling you what to do and how to do it. They’ll start taking your freedom from you.” And I’m glad he didn’t live this long. I’m the same way.

Partial Transcript: Oh, they was fine. They had no problem with the ones—our neighbors and all—never had any problem. There was one fella one time, my brother hit his son, and this was when we lived in Tryon. And this man drank, and he—Daddy was running a little store at that time for another man. And the man came over with a shotgun that he had borrowed from my granddaddy. (laughs) He told Daddy, he says, “Your boy beat my boy up.” And he says, “I’m gonna whip him. If I have to, I’ll shoot you, so you just stay out of it. I’m gonna whip that boy.” Daddy jumped him, took the shotgun, and beat him out the door, run him off. And he kept the shotgun, and he carried it to the house. My granddaddy said, “Hey, that’s my shotgun!” He said, “I loaned it to that fella, and he was supposed to bring it back and he didn’t.” He planned on going and getting it, but he didn’t go.

Partial Transcript: Well, he was a Republican, and the Democrats was controlling the county. And if you got a mule or a job with the state, you had to be a Democrat. And Republicans couldn’t get in, because most of the votes were absentee ballots, and they finally did get a little help, and they started getting in some of the offices. But that’s a bitter time. That’s bad when people treat their fellow man like that. We got a mule a few years later—about two or three years later. That’s when it started forming. I had the land but didn’t have the mule. We had the equipment—plows, planters. But we made it without a mule—without a government mule.

Partial Transcript: We raised a garden by digging it up, but we didn’t farm. We rented the land to another man, and he got most all of it. He had the mule and his own equipment, and we got a fourth of what he made, which we were tickled to get. And then he quit farming, and he started growing—we started cutting—keeping little pines cut off of it, and we finally got a mule and started plowing it up. But it wasn’t an easy time. Once all we had to eat was corn, and if there was one thing—just one thing to have—I would want to have corn. You can make grits out of it, grind it into chicken feed—fine chicken feed—you got grits. And we ate grits. And you can make cornbread, grind it into meal and make cornbread. And you could make—what is it?—that whole corn with the husk off. I forget what they call it. Anyway, my daddy would make that—hominy is the name. And he’d take a flour sack. You know, at that time flour and salt came in bags. Now you could get salt from a barrel, but sugar came in bags. Some places had it in barrels, but we would trade at the A&P, and they had bagged sugar. But he’d take the flour sack and put corn in it, maybe a gallon of corn, and out of the fireplace you get ashes and put ‘em in the dishpan and then pour water in the dishpan and put the corn down in that, fill the dishpan up enough. And the ashes had acid in them. Leave the corn there overnight sometimes would be enough to get the husk to turn loose and sometimes you’d have to leave it night and day. But when the husk would peel off, you can just get it off so easy. Then you cook what’s left of the kernels. Oh, it was good. That’s hominy corn. Another way, you can parch it. Now parched corn is not easy to eat. You’ve gotta have good teeth, but that’s kind of a snack. You have corn, put it in your pocket and you can eat on it, you know, once in a while like you would peanuts. We didn’t raise any peanuts that I can remember.

Partial Transcript: Well, we didn’t raise any of those, but we helped neighbors that raised it to strip the cane to take a stick, flatten it off like a knife, and you’d strip all that fodder off, leaves off, and you’d cut the cane and then you’d cut the top off, the seed. We helped our neighbors do it. You’d have—a man that knew how to make molasses. We’d go to different places. You had to make an appointment with him to be there at a certain time. He’d bring his bill, two big wheels, and use his mule. He had a pole on it and the mule would walk around, and he’d stick the cane stalks in between those big wheels, and it would catch ‘em and mash ‘em flat, mash the juice out into a—well, he had a half whiskey barrel that was set under to catch the juice. And you’d carry that juice—well, they’d put up a mill built up with rock and mud to make a place that they set this big pan on. The pan must have been about four or five feet across, maybe eight or ten feet long. They had different sizes. But then you’d build a fire under there, and you’d take the juice and put it in, let it run down, and it heated up and it bubbled, and it’d bubble the water out of it. Then they had—what those bubbles would be what they called the skimmings. You had a little box like made of shovel, one end open of course. It had two sides back, and the bottom was full of nail holes. You scooped that in there and picked it up and the juice would drain through, and the bubbles would stay in and you dump it off. And as the juice run down, it’d get cooked all the way down, and down at the end—well, it would go down and the way the pan was made go through one and go all the way across, and then the place on the other side, it could come back. That’s the way it went all the way. If it wasn’t done by the time it got to the last place, you’d just dip it back up with a different dipper that didn’t have holes in it and just recook it. And when it got right, Dad opened the spout and come out, check it, and you’d chew a piece of cane and put it under the spout and catch it and then turn the spout off, let it cool a little bit. You could see how it dipped—how it ran off. If it’s very slow running off, it was ready. That’s the way they checked it.

Partial Transcript: Oh yes, yes. If you had a big job to do, you would ask your neighbors when they could help you, and well, okay, put up a barn. The neighbors, when they got where they could lay by their fields or could have a break, and all of ‘em you get together and come and help you put up the barn. And we put up one one time, cut logs—myself and my dad cut the logs—and my brother skinned the bark off of ‘em—and let ‘em dry somewhat before we built the barn. But when we got ready for the barn, the neighbors came, and in one day it went up and put—used poles for the roof and boards across it for cover. We did have nails, but we didn’t have any big ones for the logs. We notched the logs, and they could fit it in—had big cracks about like that—put mud in that.

Partial Transcript: Oh, if there was sickness in the family, a man couldn’t work his fields, the neighbors were doing work and take care of it for him. Maybe two or three of ‘em at a time would go and be—well, two or three—mules and the plowing. And the kids would do the hoeing, hoe the wheat out that a plow couldn’t get because you’d get crops. The cotton fields, you plant cotton—the seeds too close together because sometimes you’d get some seeds that wouldn’t come up. And what they’d do when it came up, you’d do what they call chopping cotton. You hoe, and you leave the cotton wide enough apart so they wouldn’t interfere too much with each other, I guess maybe twelve inches apart, but they’d be planted about four inches apart. You’d have to chop it out.

Oh one other thing. We raised okra. We raised quite a bit of okra and tomatoes, and my mother would put up tomato soup with okra and tomatoes. We used a lot of soup.

Partial Transcript: Chicken. (laughs) Yeah, chicken. We didn’t have much meat. Once we—well, we didn’t have any money. But a fellow bought two pigs and let Daddy take care of ‘em—well, I took care of ‘em mostly—and we raised the pigs. He took one of ‘em and we had one, and we had meat then. But most of the time, the meat was fish, rabbits, squirrels, and one day Daddy went squirrel hunting, and he was on the river. A lot of trees growed [sic] on the river that were nut trees—hickory nuts or acorns. But while he was there, there was a duck eating acorns. Well, a goose—he killed that goose. He broke the law. But he come back all the way around through the woods by a still or two and come right on in home, and he just about ran, I think, all the way. He was out of breath. His face was so red, shirt was wet, and this was wintertime. But we cleaned that thing, buried the feathers, feet, and bill and all. We buried ‘em, and we ate that goose. And it was fat. I don’t like fat goose. I’d sit there—well, Momma took most of it—the fat—off before she cooked it. But any left, I tasted it but I had to get it off. I couldn’t eat it. But that meat was mighty good. Well she baked it. She boiled it first, then she baked it. Boy it was good, and with the sweet potatoes with it, boy that was a good meal.

Partial Transcript: Well that’s when we had this time that we had corn to eat, that was all. That was for a couple of months we lived on corn. And some people don’t like grits, and I told them, “I like ‘em. They saved my life.” We ate grits. We never did have the money that we could buy our lunches at school, so we could grow nice turnips, and we’d take turnips—a whole big shoppin’ bag full of ‘em—and with the greens on it to school and they’d give us one ticket for our lunch. And when I saw also—I’d dig up pine stumps for pitch pine and split it up into kindling, little strips, and carry a bundle about that big, about that long, and they’d give us a ticket for that. I carried several bundles. (laughs) But that’s the only way we had lunch. The rest of the time, we didn’t have anything to take. Now, we had—most of the time we had stuff for breakfast. Daddy would make syrup out of sugar and water and boil that stuff and put a little bit of vanilla flavoring in it. It tasted good with biscuits. We had that for breakfast. And sometimes we’d have a little bit of fatback and fry it out for the grease, and if the hens were laying, we could have something to fry our eggs in.

But we didn’t have many chickens, and the big hawk used to fly over. That took care of ‘em. But I took care of one of them. I had a neighbor had some steel traps, and I was telling him about the hawks getting our chickens. And he said, “I’ll fix it for you.” He gave me a number-two and two number-one steel traps. So this hawk picked up a hen, carried her off onto the side of the hill. We lived on a hill, and he flew over to another hill, and I saw where he went. I marked it good by the trees. So I let him leave. I went over there, and there’s quite a bit of that hen left. So I staked that hen down, and I tied all them straps to bushes and things and put ‘em around that hen. The next day I come in from school, I looked over there and saw something moving. So I put my books down. Boy, I took off, got over there, and there was that big hawk. And I—he jumped at me. He had traps on both feet, and I found me a stick, and after I finished with him, he didn’t jump anymore. I got him out of the traps and carried him to the house, and I tried to get my mother to cook him, and she would not. I said—she says, “You can’t tell what that thing eat.” I says, “I’ll tell you what it ate. It ate my hen. You know how many chickens we’ve lost? That’s what that hawk’s been living on.” Hawks live on chickens, large birds, rabbits, live stuff, rats, snakes, but that’s what they eat, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I couldn’t talk her into it. She would not cook it. She said, “You bury it.” I said, “Well, I wouldn’t have brought it home if I thought you wouldn’t have cooked it.”

One thing I did get her to cook was mud turtle. I caught mud turtles, and the way I’d catch them—I know it’s against the law now. I never heard of people that couldn’t catch mud turtles, but I bought me a big hook, I guess about a number-eight hook. It was huge. And I tied baling wire—that’s something everybody had on the farm—baling wire. I tied the hook on that baling wire, tied the baling wire to a little tree, and I baited that hook with some kind of meat, whatever meat we had, or I have caught rats. And I could always get a rat in the corn crib. They’re not supposed to be there, but they’d get some way and they’d get in it, and I’d start kicking corn around and knocking it every way. There’d go a rat, and I’d catch that thing. Sometimes I’d give out trying to catch ‘em, and I had a little dog. I’d go get that little dog, and I’d start moving the corn, and that dog would catch the rat, never missed. But I’d take a rat down there and put it on the hook, throw it out, and the next day I got out a turtle, and I’ve caught ‘em, some of ‘em big as a washtub, but I’ve caught some big ones. And that’s something else that’ll fight you, those big turtles. One was jumping at me one time, and I jumped out of the way, and I found a stick and I took that stick and I—trying to keep him back, and he snapped the end of that stick off. So I just pulled him around and around, got him on his back and started dragging him. He got—he’d get back over though. That’s something a terrapin can’t do. Don’t ever turn—some people call ‘em box turtles—don’t even turn a box turtle on its back, ‘cause its legs is up too far away. It can’t touch the ground. It’ll die. But my mother, I’d take it to the house. My mother—I’d cut its head off, and my mother would clean it, cook it, and it taste—some people says it’s got seven different tastes to it. Every piece I ate tasted the same—tasted like chicken. And after I got married, my wife wouldn’t cook a turtle, the hard shell turtles. Anyway, I asked her mother. She said, “Oh yes, I can cook a turtle.” So I started catching some more turtles, and she’d fix ‘em for me, but she ate ‘em. We all ate ‘em. But you just cut the head off. By the way, if you cut a turtle’s head off, don’t touch it. Don’t get close to it. Because that thing will take hours. You touch it with a stick, and it’ll snap that stick. It’ll still snap, and boy, it better be a good stick or it’ll snap it in two. But I played with ‘em—the heads—after I’d cut ‘em off, with a broomstick and they’d snap. You’d touch ‘em on the side and they would open their mouth and snap.

Partial Transcript: Oh this? Oh, I purchased this in 1960, and I only paid three-hundred fifty dollars an acre for it. Supposedly it was thirty acres, but it wasn’t. The deed calls it seventy-five, except twenty acres sold to one person, twenty acres sold to another one, ten acres sold to another one, one acre sold to another one. So there wasn’t. I only had twenty-four acres left. But I sold six off to my brother-in-law, top of the hill over there that was full of trees. But I had a place over the—small field over on the hill, and I pushed off down below there all the way to the stream and made a pasture. I built this house in sixty-four. It took me a while to pay for the land, but soon as I paid for the land, I started saving, and I got six thousand dollars, and I went out and got a loan, built this house. Then I bought a piece over there to join it, and it’s about five and a half acres of it. And that I gave to my son—my oldest son, my nephew. Then on down that road, place on the right, my daughter and son-in-law lives there, and they bought a trailer and put it in. I tried to get ‘em to build, but they didn’t want too. It’d take too long and cost too much. But they’re making it okay. They got an eighty-foot trailer, fourteen wide, so that’s okay—holding up good. But my son built a house on the upper end of the pasture. He’s got a bigger house than I’ve They’ve always gotta beat you, you know, do a little better. (laughs)

Partial Transcript: Well, let’s say this fake money that we can’t back up to paper, what if China discovered—China, Russia, some other have already discovered—that the money is worthless? They are right now buying everything they can buy with the American dollars that they’ve got of ours, see? And they’re trying to get rid of it. But they’ve already made deals. You know, the money—everything you buy in this world based on the American dollar value. You want to buy oil? You buy American dollars to pay for the oil. Everything you buy, you’ve got to have American dollars to pay for it. That’s gonna change, and the people that don’t know how to raise a garden or how to live off the land, what are they gonna do? They better be learning if they don’t know how to raise their own food, how to dig for their own water. Our water is another thing that’s being ruined. That stream over there you crossed, I wouldn’t take a drink of water out of it for no amount of money. All kind of stuff up above have been in that. It was a slaughterhouse up there. The septic tanks they dumped all this stuff in overflowed from a big rain, and it washed down through their—stink terrible. I don’t think you’d live through drinking that water. A few places back in the mountains—very few back where it’s unpopulated—you might drink out of the streams. But no place around here could you drink out of the streams. So I mean, you’ve got to learn to dig for water, and how long that’s going to last? I don’t know. I don’t know if you heard, but just a couple of miles over here—in fact, about a mile—the ground is polluted with spray—apple spray—orchards—and when I bought this place, there were two coveys of partridges, bobwhites. One was using down in the bottom, and the other one was using around here and in that pasture over there. You won’t find one now, not one. I haven’t seen one in years. I haven’t heard one in years, and I got an apple orchard around. Our water may be contaminated. Hopefully it never will be. Hopefully it’ll come with an 1:22:06.4 (???) (inaudible), keep going down or flowing away. ‘Cause I’ve dug—or had ‘em dug—five wells on this place. The last one was right there, and all my first wells, you’d get a gallon, a gallon a half a minute. This fellow went eight-five—a hundred eighty-five feet. You get twenty-seven gallons a minute. That’d feed everybody here if it was piped. And it’s good water so far.

Partial Transcript: Well, most of the kids have already lost it. They don’t know about it, but as far as I’m concerned, real life, real living, everything that we have comes from the land, everything. You name one thing that doesn’t come from the land. Even we come from the land. And the Bible says, “From dust you came, and dust you shall return.” We’re gonna be recycled. Well, when I was a child, we didn’t have all this plastic, and that is terrible for the land. It’d lay on the land, disintegrate, and what it finally does is pollute it even more when it rots, decays. But we have polluted this land. All these power-creating machines that they use coal, they use oil, and blowing smoke, it’s like the old wood-burning freight trains. My time, they’d already started burning coal. All railroads burned coal, and I like to smell the smoke from that coal smell, that train. But I know it isn’t good for you. They’ve finally gotten rid of that. It was really hard to handle, and they built oil-burning trains. So now you just turn on a valve to feed the engines to run a generator that runs the train.

Partial Transcript: Well, they can be told, but they really need to get out and visit the land. All of them surely could have a small plot that they could raise vegetables on or flowers or see what the ground can produce. Better if they grow vegetables. Oh, one other thing. I was talking about the stuff that we raised. I did tell you that we raised okra? Yeah. And that’s something that most people—well, I don’t mean most—a lot of people doesn’t like. They won’t eat it. But I love okra. That’s some of the—that’s the best, especially fried and floured—rolled in flour. Oh, it’s so good. I can eat a pot of it by myself, or a pan of it.

Partial Transcript: Oh well, yeah. River Bridge, down when we lived on the river. Some big boys. I didn’t have any my age, hardly seldom ever. Anyway, big boys, I’d play with them. And they were jumping off of a pier down on some sand. It must have been about probably twelve feet, and two of ‘em jumped. And they was after me to jump. They just kept on and on for me to jump. I get out on it, and I look at it, and it looked like it’s too far down. And finally they talked me into it. They said, “Well, you land in the sand. It’s not like landing on a hard road or something hard. It’s not—it’s soft sand.” So I jumped, and this knee caught me in the chin and pushed that up. I cut my tongue on my bottom teeth through my bottom lip, which I don’t know how it got inside. And my tongue was out. That was my last jump. And a wonder I hadn’t broke my neck. My knee hit my chin. The sand wasn’t soft. It was hard packed where the water had run over it, and this was up on a bank. When the water got high, it’d wash sand up on the bank. But that taught me that. I’ve done some foolish things.

Oh, one of the things I did, we didn’t raise cotton. One time we tried raising cotton. They made us chop most of it down because we’d planted too much, more than was allocated. So they made us chop down our best cotton. That was the last cotton we raised. But I would pick cotton in the fall when it was ready. I’d pick cotton, and I got fifty cents a hundred pounds for picking it. And I can pick about a hundred pounds. It’d be—the least I’d pick was ninety-seven, I believe, and the most I picked was a hundred and five I think. That’s close. But I didn’t pick over a hundred. Most of the time, it was about ninety-eight, ninety-seven. But I was very particular in the cotton I picked. I picked the good, well-opened, fluffy cotton dried out. Some of the people would—it was just starting to come out, and they’d pick it. It was green, wet, packed, hard, weighed twice or more what mine weighed. But I wouldn’t do that. You couldn’t use it. Anyway, I could buy my shoes and my pants, shirts for school. I also bought my first air rifle. It cost me one dollar. It was like the Red Rider, but it didn’t have that piece of leather on it, and it didn’t have the ring on it—exactly the same gun for one dollar. The Red Rider was a dollar and a half, and I 1:32:32.3 (???) (inaudible) got no day’s work for it.

Partial Transcript: Yeah. Things that didn’t help it. But I started shooting. I could shoot rabbits, kill rabbits. Squirrels—shoot a squirrel and it’d jump and wherever I hit it, it’d shake that leg. Or if I hit it in the back, it’d jump, scream, and run up the tree a little farther. I could never—that air rifle would not kill a squirrel, but it’d take care of rabbits. But I had been killing rabbits with rocks and sticks, but got that air rifle, I took care of that. And then a couple of years later, I guess I must have been eleven years old, I bought a twenty-two rifle—wore out twenty-two rifle—for three dollars. And boy, then I’d get the squirrels. I kept us in squirrels in fall and winter, and they were good eating. My mother would boil them and then put little pieces of dough in, call ‘em dumplings. So we had squirrel and dumplings maybe twice a week. Boy, they were good.

Partial Transcript: Learn to fish. That’d be my first thing. Learn to fish, because I fished all my life off and on, and I’ve taught my grandson to fish, and he’d rather fish than anything. He doesn’t smoke, doesn’t chew, doesn’t do drugs, and he’d rather than eat, he’d rather fish. I’ll go take him fishing, I’ll make us a sandwich. He won’t eat his sandwich, “Not now! Not now!” He’s fishing. He’s caught a larger bass than I have, a black bass. He caught a large mouth bass six and a half pounds. That’s twenty-four inches long.

Partial Transcript: Well, dig in the ground. Raise something, no matter what it is. Weeds will grow by themselves, but grow something you can eat. Here’s something—there’s two other things. The farmers—we didn’t have a mule—the farmers—I’d go to different farmers that had gathered their corn and asked them if I could glean the field. “Oh sure. Well, go to it.” I’d take a tow bag, and I’d go—it’d be little pieces of corn this long. A lot of times, they’d leave it on the stalk. A lot of times they’d tear it off, throw it down. They grew ears this long or that long, and that’s what they were really pulling all out, but I could find places where they had been—had their wagon throwing corn into the wagon and one’d fall off and go under. They’d forget to pick it up, and I’d have a big, nice, long ear. But I’d get all I could carry, and I’d take it home and clean it good. I’d shuck it and break it, and some of those little short ones would have cob out there where it hadn’t filled up with corn. Well, I’d shell all that corn. The ones—the little short things were hard to shell, but once it’s shelled, it looked the same as the grains on this big ear. I’d take it to the mill where they ground it and sell it to ‘em. They’d buy it. Other people would grow peas, and my daddy and my brother would go and pick peas. They’d give us half what we picked. We’d thrash ‘em all out, and the way you’d thrash ‘em, you’d pick ‘em as real dry. Don’t pick any that isn’t dry. And you would take a tow bag or burlap bags, take all the strings out, and lay ‘em out, four or ‘em, and sew ‘em together and make a nice-size sheet. Put the peas on that. By the way, they use that for cotton too. Put the peas in that, get all four corners up, and then beat the thing with a stick. Now, you’d have a stick maybe this long, two of ‘em or maybe one of ‘em a little shorter than the other one. And you’d tie ‘em together with a string or a piece of leather—rawhide leather’s the best thing. Then you’d beat that sack of peas with a smaller pick, and the larger one is what you’d use to sling it with. And that was called a frail, and you’d frail that sack of peas and beat ‘em so they’d all open up. The peas again, you’d throw ‘em up a little, you know, and get the chaff out, and take all the hulls out, throw ‘em away and then shake the peas some more, and the chaff out, and then put ‘em in jars or buckets that had lids. That’s mighty good eatin’ in the wintertime.

Another thing, at that time I didn’t know it, if it was against the law to sell rabbits. And a woman I sold ‘em too didn’t know either evidently. There’s a lady run a grocery store about three miles from where I live, and I would make—I made rabbit trap, rabbit boxes. And I’d set ‘em and put something in it, old apples or something that—I have put corn in. The rabbits would go in and trigger the thing, and that door would drop down and trap it. Well, I’d go and set it up on its back end and open the lid and put my hand down in there, and if the rabbits head was toward me, it’d scramble trying to get turned over. I’d get all of its legs and drag it out. I had dragged ‘em out by the head, well, once. I never drug ‘em out by the head. Boy that thing, the back legs, it was digging into me, kicking, kicking me, and it was hard to catch, but it scratched pretty good. Always catch a rabbit by his hind legs. Well I would go before the bus—before I’d make the bus, and I’d go to all my boxes and bring the rabbits out. I’ve caught as much as four at one time. I had nine boxes. And I cleaned those rabbits. I’d leave the back feet on with some fur on it. But I’d cut the front off, cut the head off. The reason I left that on was so you could tell that it was a rabbit, not a cat or something. I’d ride the bus up to Pea Ridge, and the bus had to turn and go down to the river again on the main highway. And while it was going down there, I’d get out and walk about like from here to the highway over there and carry my rabbits. This lady who run the store gave me fifteen cents a piece. To me that was big money. But I made some money selling rabbits. Thing about this, see, you can’t sell ‘em now, but you sure could eat ‘em. We don’t want to eat ‘em any more.

And one other thing we ate, opossums. We’d make a box, put it—we called ‘em possums—put the possums in it and feed ‘em—feed ‘em whatever you had that you could feed ‘em. They liked sweet potatoes and buttermilk. One time we had that, and we could feed ‘em that. Sometimes we only had the sweet potatoes. Sometimes we didn’t have that. Well, we didn’t eat many of ‘em, but during the war, you could not buy grease—you know—lard. I think we were allowed one pound a month. I’m not sure, but I think one pound a month of lard we could have. Kind of hard, family of four or five, to get along on one pound of lard a month. And at that time, I had never heard of vegetable oil. That’s something new. It was lard. Now, there was vegetable shortening, but it was still like hog lard. But my mother wouldn’t use that vegetable shortening. She’d buy pure lard made from hogs. Those rabbits I’d sell to that lady, she had a big ice box she’d put ‘em in, and she sold ‘em and ate ‘em.

Partial Transcript: I don’t know. I never did find out. I might have gone up on my price if I had. (laughs) Oh, she probably got a quarter for ‘em. That’s my guess.

Partial Transcript: Oh, you’re quite welcome.

Partial Transcript: And the following day is his and Mildred’s sixty-seventh wedding anniversary.