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A Poor Boy’S Odyssey
A Poor Boy’S Odyssey
A Poor Boy’S Odyssey
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A Poor Boy’S Odyssey

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This is a memoir about my ninety-three years on this earth and the good luck I have had. It borrows from previous self-published memoirs about growing up on a farm during the depression of the 1930s, about real estate investments, and about a career in governmental service. That started with an entry grade of GS-6 trainee in the Border Patrol and ended with retirement twenty-one years later in grade GS-15. After retirement I was executive assistant to the CEO of the National Rifle Association, followed by two years as Deputy Executive Vice President (CEO)

Good luck was a major factor in my success, but the luck was helped by the capacity for hard work developed on the farm as a teenager. Other factors in my successes were my natural ability for pistol marksmanship and my experience as an airplane pilot in World War II.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherAuthorHouse
Release dateJun 20, 2014
ISBN9781496919670
A Poor Boy’S Odyssey

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    A Poor Boy’S Odyssey - Joe White

    AuthorHouse™ LLC

    1663 Liberty Drive

    Bloomington, IN 47403

    www.authorhouse.com

    Phone: 1-800-839-8640

    © 2014 Joe White. All rights reserved.

    No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

    Published by AuthorHouse 06/18/2014

    ISBN: 978-1-4969-1857-4 (sc)

    ISBN: 978-1-4969-1967-0 (e)

    Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

    Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

    Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

    Contents

    PART ONE: THE EARLY DAYS

    Chapter One

    Chapter Two

    Chapter Three

    Chapter Four

    Chapter Five

    Chapter Six

    PART TWO: THE GUITAR

    PART THREE: THE MILITARY

    Chapter One: Initiation

    Chapter Two: Double Duty

    PART FOUR: COMPETITIVE PISTOL SHOOTING

    Chapter One: Early Matches

    Chapter Two: Getting Serious

    Chapter Three: Shooting Equipment

    Chapter Four: With The Tampa Police

    Chapter Five: More Target Guns For Me

    Chapter Six: A Top Gunsmith

    Chapter Seven: My First National Matches For Pistol

    PART FIVE: ESSAYS

    PART SIX: THE JOY OF FLYING

    PART SEVEN: PROSE AND POETRY

    It’s better to be born lucky than rich.[Irish Proverb.]

    The harder I work the luckier I get.[Gary

    Player, Professional Golfer.]

    PART ONE

    Leprechaun_with_Flute.jpg

    THE EARLY DAYS

    A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, George Orwell once wrote, because any life when viewed from within is simply a series of defeats.

    You may believe the following story or not. Years ago Casey Stengel was coach of the New York Yankees baseball team. He liked to tell stories about baseball in the earlier days. He always ended his yarns by saying, You can look it up. That might be a good ending for this story. I have had my share of defeats, but I wouldn’t bother to write a book about them. Many of these comments and stories have been taken from my books that were written when I was a few years younger.

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    I was born in1920, in a little unpainted wood-frame house on the edge of a small cotton farm in Natural Bridge, Alabama. It was three-hundred yards from a rock formation that created a natural bridge, and that gave the village its name. My father was a coal miner and part-time farmer and my mother taught first and second grade in school. She had a high-school diploma, and that’s all she needed at the time. My father had two years of high school and was a veteran of the First World War. She lived with his sister and parents while he fought in the First World War, and they married as soon as he came home from France.

    When I was five, when my sister was three and a half, and when my brother Quinton was two, my family moved to Lawrence County, Tennessee. They moved with my father’s parents, who wanted to be near grandpa’s sister and her husband, Bob Rooker. One of my mother’s aunts was married to George Roberts and also lived in Tennessee, only a few miles away.

    Rumor had it that Bob Rooker had spent a year in jail for making moonshine whiskey and he moved to Tennessee so that his new neighbors wouldn’t know about it. I grew up there on a farm during the depression of the 1930s. This is my story, which starts with the beginning of my book Forged in a Country Crucible, Second Edition, published by AuthorHouse. (Publish on demand.) It is available from AuthorHouse or on my web site at www.josephcwhite.com.

    CHAPTER ONE

    I woke to the sound of the coffee grinder. It was below freezing outside, and Dad had banked the fire the night before by covering the burning backlog with ashes. The only warmth during the night had been the heat remaining in the fireplace bricks and that generated by the bodies of two adults and seven children living in the house. I knew dad had already started fires in the fireplace and in the kitchen stove, because he always did that before he ground the coffee beans.

    It was New Year’s Day, 1936, and I was 15 ½ years old. I was big for my age, and had been working in the fields since I was ten and doing hard work as a teenager. I had one sister and five brothers, all born after I was.

    I slept in a room behind the kitchen in an unpainted, weather-beaten farmhouse in Tennessee. We had no gas, no electricity, no running water, and no plumbing. The toilet was either out the front door, across the road, and into the woods; or out the kitchen door, behind the house, and into the privy in the edge of the field. The Works Projects Administration (WPA) had built the privy for us in 1933. Before that we went either into the woods or behind the barn.

    I dreaded going to bed when the weather was cold. I had no way to warm the sheets except to lie still until my body heat warmed a spot, and if I moved I had to warm another spot. I have since read that pioneer families put hot coals into a metal box on a handle and slid it over the cold sheets to warm them, but we had nothing like that.

    I wore long underwear and a long-sleeved work shirt in bed. Mama sewed the shirt, the pillowcase, and the sheets from cloth salvaged from empty fertilizer sacks. It was rough, but I didn’t mind because I had worn such clothing for years. The material was oyster white and had a tighter weave than brown burlap. Sometimes we bought flour in cloth sacks with red or blue patterns, but Mama used that cloth to make dresses and underwear for herself and my sister.

    The fertilizer company printed the chemical analysis in big black numbers on the fertilizer sacks, and we were never able to remove them. The cheapest fertilizer available was 2-10-2, commonly referred to as 10-2-2, and for years we used only that to fertilize our cotton plants. A slightly more expensive formula was 4-10-4, or 10-4-4. Recently Dad and Mama were sitting on the front porch while the kids were playing in the yard. Dad said times must be getting better, because last year all the shirts had 10-2-2 on them, and now two of them have 10-4-4.

    The old iron bedstead was spotted with rust. The home-made mattress was four inches thick and stuffed with cotton. It lay on a section of woven wire mesh, attached to the bed frame by pull springs spaced six inches apart along each side of the metal bed frame and across each end. The patchwork quilts were stuffed with cotton.

    I knew that either Mama or Eunice, my sister, would be up soon and making biscuits and thick, white gravy—the standard morning meal for the family. Soon I would have to get up and wash my face and hands for breakfast. My bladder was full, but I didn’t want to use the chamber pot under the bed because I would have to empty and wash it later. So I lay in my warm spot and thought about the year ahead.

    We expected to plant twenty acres of corn, ten acres of cotton, five acres of hay, and five acres of miscellaneous crops such as watermelons, potatoes, sorghum cane, and peanuts. We had a half-acre plot reserved for a garden and ten acres under fence for pasture. We did all the planting, cultivating, and harvesting with manual labor, using two mules and a few basic farm tools. Dad used to say he farmed the way an Irishman played the fiddle, by main strength and awkwardness. He was Scots-Irish, so he was poking fun only at himself.

    I knew I would be busy in January and February going to high school, cutting firewood and cook wood, repairing fences, cleaning stables, and spreading manure for fertilizer. In March I would be following the two-mule turning plow after school and on Saturdays, preparing the land for planting. High school ran from early September to late May.

    In April we would plant corn and Irish potatoes, and in May we would plant cotton and several other crops. During most of the year, some crop would need planting, some would need cultivating, or some would need harvesting. There might be a week or two of slack time in August, after the last cultivation ended and before the harvest of the sorghum cane began.

    I wondered if there would be enough rain to produce a good crop—some recent years had been so dry the land produced very little. I wondered if there would be enough money to pay for the seed, feed, and fertilizer we would need. These were Dad’s worries, but I shared his anxiety. He always hoped to have enough money left at the end of the year so he wouldn’t have to borrow to put in a crop the following year. So far, it had never happened.

    My parents thought it was important to own the farm rather than to sharecrop. But mortgages were risky, because the entire balance came due each year at harvest time. Most borrowers paid only the interest and renewed the mortgage for another year. If the mortgage holder insisted on all the money, the borrower was in trouble and might have to move.

    Since Dad and Grandpa had owed their mortgages to the man who sold them the land, they worried he might not let them renew at the end of the year. So they had gone to a bank and refinanced their mortgages to pay off the original mortgagee, Cullen Bass. Later I heard my dad say they had dodged lightning, because Mr. Bass had decided to call in some of his other loans and would not renew them.

    Compared to some we were poor, but I was happy. Since my parents were buying the farm, we didn’t have to move frequently as some sharecroppers did. Dad said we were better off than people who lived in town and had to live out of a paper sack. We always had food from the produce we grew. It was rarely elegant, but it was wholesome.

    We were quietly proud of our independence, and our parents taught us the satisfaction of earning a living by hard, honest labor. Dad said we could look anyone in the eye because we kept our word and paid our debts. We had been through some hard years, but we were thankful for what we had.

    The Nashville Tennessean newspaper had recently run stories about a German named Hitler and about the possibility of war in Europe. That was disturbing news, but I had farming and high-school algebra to worry about, and that helped take my mind off what was happening thousands of miles away.

    Finally, I got out of bed, retrieved my overalls and my denim jumper from a nearby chair, and dressed quickly. It would have been too dark to see inside the privy, so I hurried out the front door, crossed the road, and relieved my bladder beside a little path in the woods. That was closer and more convenient than going behind the barn. When somebody said he had to go out, nobody thought he was looking for fresh air or sunshine.

    Someone I knew told me a story about a farmer who went to visit his cousin in the city. They showed him how their indoor plumbing worked, and that afternoon they cooked and ate barbecue in the back yard. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, he said later. They eat in the yard and pee in the house.

    CHAPTER TWO

    I came through the living room and into the kitchen. Shore is cold, I said to no one in particular. Yep, shore is, Dad replied. But that was good kindling wood you brought in last night. Fire caught up real easy this morning. Each night I brought in enough firewood, cook wood and kindling wood for the following morning and stacked it on the front porch near the door. If I did this, Dad got up first the next morning and made the fires in the fireplace and in the kitchen stove. But if the wood was not on the porch, he woke me and sent me out to bring the wood from the woodpile and make the fires myself. That had happened one cold night the previous winter, and after that I never forgot.

    I took a dipperful of water from the bucket and poured it into the metal wash pan on a table by the back door. Then I went to the kitchen stove and dipped some hot water from the reservoir. I poured it into the wash pan with the cold water, washed my face and hands, and dried them on the community towel that hung on a nail in the corner. Then I opened the back door and threw the used water into the back yard.

    The biscuits were in the oven, and Mama was stirring the gravy as it simmered in an iron skillet on the stove. We called it Hoover gravy because Herbert Hoover had been the president during the early days of the depression, and most people blamed the hard times on him.

    To make the gravy she had put a quarter cupful of lard into the skillet and heated it until it melted. Then she added flour and salt and cooked the mixture, stirring constantly, until the flour turned brown. Next she added milk until the skillet was almost full, and stirred it until it boiled and became thick and smooth.

    All the kids except the twins were now in the kitchen with both parents. The babies were only nine months old and were still asleep. Mama poured the gravy into a big bowl and put it in the middle of the table. When the biscuits were brown, she took them out of the oven, put them on a platter, and placed them near the gravy.

    Dad had built the table of pine boards, and had attached two wooden benches that ran the length of the table, one on each side. Our parents usually sat in cane-bottomed, ladder-backed chairs, one at each end of the table; and the kids sat on the benches. Sometimes on Sundays or on special occasions we covered the table with a clean sheet, but most of the time the table was bare wood.

    Mama made big biscuits. She started with a bowl of flour and added salt, baking soda, an egg, and melted lard. She made a depression in the middle of the flour mixture and poured in milk slowly as she stirred it into the flour. She kept on pouring, stirring, and mixing until the dough had the consistency she wanted. If the dough was too loose she added more flour, and if it was too stiff she added more milk.

    Then she picked up dough a handful at a time and rolled it between the palms of her hands to form a biscuit. Finally, she flattened it and placed it into a greased pan. When the pan was full, she put it into the oven. Her biscuits were usually at least three inches in diameter.

    I put a helping of gravy on my plate, sprinkled it with black pepper, and took one of the biscuits. I broke a chunk from the biscuit and wiped it across my plate through the gravy. Then I put the piece of biscuit in my mouth, making sure not to drop gravy on the table or into my lap. After I chewed and swallowed that bite, I took another piece of biscuit and repeated the process. We all ate biscuits and gravy that way, and so did our neighbors. I usually ate five or six biscuits and at least a cupful of gravy.

    Someone wrote a country song about this kind of food, and it became a favorite on the Grand Ole Opry. The chorus was: Pass the biscuits, Mirandy, I’m jest as hongry as sin. Pass the gravy, Mirandy, I need some sop to sop ‘em in.

    Sometimes in summer we had cantaloupe to go with biscuits and gravy. That may sound like a weird combination, but to me, a ripe sweet cantaloupe with hot biscuits and gravy was a treat. But the melon season lasted only a month or two, and we had no way to keep them in that ideal condition. Sometimes we ate biscuits with butter and sorghum molasses, and sometimes on special occasions we had biscuits with chocolate gravy. Mama made that gravy with butter instead of lard, and she added chocolate flavoring and sugar. That, too, was a delicacy to be savored.

    Our neighbors, the Voss family, had twelve children, and they all liked butter and sorghum molasses with their biscuits for breakfast. They let all of their milk form curds and then churned it to make butter, so the only milk they drank was buttermilk. They also had only buttermilk with their cornbread for their evening meal, which everybody called supper. We called the noon meal dinner.

    We also liked home-made grape jelly and watermelon-rind preserves with our biscuits for breakfast, and one of the best was pear preserves. We didn’t grow pears in our orchard, but sometimes we got a bushel or two from Uncle George Roberts, who lived three miles away and was married to my mother’s aunt. They had several trees, and occasionally had more fruit than they could use. They were Bosc pears, but we called them sand pears. My sister told me that when Uncle George sold that farm the new buyer cut down all the pear trees. I heard about it many years after the fact, but it still made me sad. Of course by the time he sold, the trees may have been so old they were no longer productive.

    Mama cut the pears into bite-sized pieces and cooked them in water and sugar to make preserves. She liked to get them when they were barely ripe, and undercooked them so they would be slightly crisp. The sugar water she cooked them in was thick and syrupy when they were done. When they were still hot she put them into fruit jars and sealed them immediately so they would keep for months.

    Having any one of these sweets was a treat, because most of the time we had only biscuits and thick, white gravy for breakfast. But I liked that too, and I never felt underprivileged for having only that for breakfast. In the summer we also had eggs on occasion, but our hens didn’t lay many in cold weather. We traded most of our eggs and our chickens to a peddler for sugar, salt, coffee, flour, and other things we didn’t grow ourselves. We sold most of our hams, pork shoulders, and side-meat bacon for cash. We kept and ate the cured sowbelly bacon and the sausage, which we cooked and then preserved while hot in Mason jars. Any farm family who ate the more expensive hams or shoulders was said to be Eating high on the hog. In recent years I have heard that called Living high on the hog, but that version doesn’t make sense to me.

    I enjoyed the smell of coffee, but never drank it. We had an old coffee pot made of gray enamelware, and my parents boiled the coffee grounds in it. Little holes on one side near the top let the coffee into the spout but kept out most of the coffee grounds. Dad often put freshly ground coffee into the pot with the old grounds and boiled them together. He said coffee couldn’t be too strong for him, just so long as the spoon didn’t bend when he tried to stir it. Sometimes when country people were out of coffee beans, they browned corn meal in a skillet and boiled it, just to have something hot to drink and to pretend they had coffee. I suppose that is like giving a pacifier to a baby. Our parents never offered coffee to any of us kids when we were young.

    After breakfast I did the chores around the barn and let the cows and mules out into the pasture so they could go to the pond and drink their fill of water. They could come back to the barn when they were ready. I knew there would be ice around the edges of the pond, but not enough to prevent them from drinking. The sub-freezing weather would have to last several days before the pond would freeze all the way across. Dad had already milked the old red cow, because she was so cantankerous nobody else could deal with her. I brought in enough wood for the evening and the following morning and went in to sit by the fire. A story in the Nashville Tennessean said ice had paralyzed the Atlantic area, but luckily for us, it hadn’t hit Middle Tennessee that hard.

    We didn’t let the mules graze in the pasture when they were doing heavy work in the summer, because eating the green grass made them short-winded. We fed them dry corn, together with hay, cured corn tops, or fodder (cured leaves from corn stalks) when they were working hard, and we took them to the watering trough for fresh water from the well at least four times a day—before and after working in the morning and also in the afternoon. After doing the chores I came back into the house and sat around the fire all morning. It was the last day of the school break for the holidays.

    My younger brother Quinton had gone into the woods the week before and gathered a bucketful of hickory nuts. When he couldn’t find enough on the ground, he climbed a hickory tree and shook the branches to make the nuts fall off. Everybody in the country called them hicker nuts. We older kids sat on the floor and used flat irons to crack the nuts on the cement hearth. We dug out the meat with horseshoe nails because they are flat. A round nail slid around the nut meat and left part of it in the shell.

    Eating them took time. People made jokes about staying up all night trying to fill up on hicker nuts, or about somebody who ate hicker nuts 24 hours a day until he starved to death. Eating nuts from scaly-bark hickory trees went faster, because they were easier to crack open and the nutmeat was thicker. The trees got that name because they had pieces of bark hanging loose on the tree, as if about to fall to the ground.

    The fireplace was four feet wide and we burned logs about three feet long. But it couldn’t heat the room when a cold wind blew. The outside walls were unpainted weatherboarding, with each board overlapping the board below. But they didn’t always fit snugly together, and there was no insulation behind them. Once after a snowstorm I found snow on my bed near the wall. The wind had blown the snow through the cracks.

    My parents had finished the overhead of each room with narrow beaded ceiling and had planned to finish the inside of the walls the same way. They ran out of ceiling material and money, however, and the ceiling on the walls went only about half way from the floor to the top. Above that, we could see the two-by-four framing. Like most country houses, ours had a galvanized metal roof, and so did the barn, the corn crib, the potato house, the smoke house, and the outhouse. I liked the metal roof, because I enjoyed listening to the drumming of raindrops when it rained.

    The floor was four-inch pine boards, fairly smooth but not sanded and finished. Mama cleaned them by scrubbing with a mop made from corn shucks. She used either home-made lye soap or wood ashes. The floor in front of the fireplace had several blackened spots, burned by embers that popped off the burning logs in the fireplace. Most farm homes had similar burned spots.

    Dry wood threw more embers than green wood, and dry chestnut wood threw the most of all. A blight had killed almost all of the chestnut trees a few years previously, and many still stood in the woods, their dead bare limbs like giant skeletons against the sky. Dead chestnut made great firewood except for the flying embers, and we burned it often in our fireplace. But we usually had a big green log for a backstick, preferably from a gum tree, because it wouldn’t burn completely and would provide live coals for starting a new fire the next morning.

    There was something hypnotic about staring into the flames, listening to the crackle, and enjoying the distinctive aroma of the burning wood. But sometimes the crackle got loud. Pockets of moisture in the dry wood caused little explosions. As the wood burned, the moisture turned to steam, and pressure from the steam caused popping sounds. Sometimes a loud pop blasted a chunk of burning wood off the log, and a flaming ember went skittering across the floor. If left alone it might set the wooden floor on fire, so nobody dared go to sleep with a fire blazing in the fireplace.

    There were no fire trucks or fire hydrants in the country. Once a house was on fire it usually burned to the ground, leaving nothing but a blackened brick chimney standing alone by the side of the road. Banking (covering) the fire with ashes at bedtime kept the embers in the fireplace during the night and preserved live coals for starting a fire the next morning.

    The floor was two feet above ground, and the sills rested on columns of concrete blocks spaced some ten feet apart around the house. The only solid foundation was for the fireplace. They built it up from a big block of concrete poured into the ground. The boards of the floor did not fit tightly together, and there were no carpets; so a cold wind came under the house and up through the floor. In addition, wind came in between the boards of the walls. But when it was only moderately cold and there was no wind, the fireplace could warm one room reasonably well.

    I could not be comfortable in our house on a cold windy day unless I wore several layers of clothing. If I sat facing the fire, the front part of my body was hot and the back part was cold. Then when I turned around with my back to the fire, my backside was hot and my front was cold.

    At eleven o’clock in the morning, Mama mixed up batter to make enough cornbread for the rest of the day. She greased the fireplace oven with lard and put the cornbread dough in it. The cast-iron oven was a foot in diameter. It was three or four inches deep and had a matching iron lid with a handle. She raked out a level bed of live coals and covered them with ashes. Then she placed the oven on the ashes and covered it with more ashes. Finally she covered those ashes with live coals and let the batter cook that way for more than an hour. When the cornbread was done, we ate some of it with canned

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