A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety (3 page)

the father who will never cease to be

alive in me.

Daddy had multiple talents, and he devoted many of them to becoming as self-sufficient as possible on the farm. He was reluctant to pay anyone else to do jobs that he could learn to do himself, so he became a competent forester, farmer, herdsman, blacksmith, carpenter, and shoemaker.

As a farm boy and later as an engineer, warehouseman, and farmer, I have had normal duties that required work with my hands, but even in my earlier days I enjoyed those experiences enough to extend them into a voluntary stage, as a hobby. I don’t know that any of my forefathers shared my fascination with building furniture or painting pictures, but they had to become competent in performing the tasks required in clearing land, building and furnishing homes, and providing and maintaining vehicles and tools required in earning a living.

I was the only boy in the family until my brother, Billy, came when I was twelve years old, so my father concentrated a lot of his attention on me. Whenever possible I followed him around, and wanted to emulate everything he did. This created a wonderful partnership for letting me learn, as a kind of apprentice, some of the skills of a craftsman. One of my earliest memories was hurrying behind Daddy on the path from our house to the blacksmith shop. The small building is still there, and I recall vividly that Daddy would sometimes let me turn the handle on the forge blower as the coals became increasingly hot and the inserted iron changed color slowly from cherry red toward white until it met Daddy’s expectations and could be moved to the adjacent anvil for shaping. This was my first real job, when I was about five years old. He would explain to me patiently the rudiments of the entire process. Later, when able, I would hold the item on the anvil with the tongs while he beat on it with a sledgehammer before dousing it in water or oil to obtain the correct hardness and toughness. When I became big enough, I performed entire blacksmithing tasks by myself.

I always assumed that Daddy had known the rudiments of carpentering from his earlier days and, helped by Jack Clark, learned to perform the routine tasks of a blacksmith. This included shaping and sharpening steel plow points, rejoining pieces of broken equipment, shoeing horses and mules, and even installing steel rims on the wooden wheels of our wagons and buggies. This last task required expanding the entire rim with heat, then quickly putting it in place and letting it shrink into a tight fit as it cooled. The anvil, bolted to a heavy base of a hickory stump, was in the center of the shop, and a waist-high workbench almost completely
surrounded the dirt floor. On the bench and hanging on the walls were the woodworking tools—saws, hammers, squares, braces and bits, levels, pry bars, tapes, and folding rules. We kept our hand tools just inside the door, and there was a large drill press standing against the wall that was used for boring either wood or steel. Only much later, when we received electricity on our farm, did Daddy install a horizontal lathe. A few feet from the shop was a large grinding wheel mounted in front of something like a tractor seat, so that pushing the pedals spun the grinder toward the operator. The corrosive wheel was immersed in part of an old rubber tire filled with water to keep it cool. This was the device that was most frequently in use, as anyone on the place could bring axes, hoes, knives, and other cutting tools to be honed. The plow points were made of much thicker metal and were sharpened in the forge and on the anvil. We kept pieces of scrap iron outside, around the shop.

A lot of our work on the farm was with wood, and the small jobs could be handled inside the shop, like making handles for hammers, axes, hoes, shovels, and rakes, and repairing wagon tongues, singletrees, and wooden parts of the plows we used for preparing land and cultivation. We also made our own wheelbarrows. Larger wood projects were supported on two or three sawhorses outside, or preferably at the building site. There was always a waiting list for building new hog farrowing pens or storage sheds for cotton seed, fertilizer, and equipment, or repairing fences and the homes or other buildings on the farm. This kind of work was done on days when fields were too wet to work, in the dormant winter months, or during “lay-by” time (after the crops were too big to plow and before harvest).

The shop was a fascinating place, where our family’s shoes were also repaired. I remember an array of metal shoe lasts of different sizes, shaped to match the feet of Daddy, Mama, my two sisters, and me. We had a supply of leather of different thicknesses that could be cut to replace worn-out soles with little wooden pegs, nails, and glue or sometimes to repair the upper body of the shoe using stitches of strong twine. As I grew older and stronger, I learned to weld and cut metal with a torch and do most of the ironworking and cobbler chores, and was proud of my grown-up responsibilities, but it was the woodworking tools that really appealed to me. I relished the repair of houses, barns, and storage places, and was eager to help when new farrowing pens were built for our sows and pigs.

A lot of our work on the farm was with wood, and the small jobs could be handled inside the shop. It was a fascinating place, where our family’s shoes were also repaired.

Daddy had a pickup truck, which I learned to drive as soon as I could see over the dashboard, and was sometimes trusted to haul seed or fertilizer to the fields. I was permitted to drive it to proms and church parties in Plains when I was twelve years old. A friend and I rescued a wrecked and abandoned Model T Ford, and we removed the entire body and affixed a wooden seat to the main frame. The automobile repairman (Rosalynn’s father) in Plains helped us get the engine running, and we used our stripped-down vehicle for off-the-road excursions.

My primary duties on the farm were all related to work in the field. When chopping cotton or hoeing weeds, all of us moved at a common pace up and down the rows, and adults received the same wages, a dollar a day. My normal pay as a small boy was twenty-five cents, which doubled when I was strong enough to carry two-gallon buckets of water from a nearby spring to the “hands” in the field. At harvesttime there was something of a competition, as workers were paid on the basis of measured achievement: how many pounds of cotton were picked from the stalk or how many peanuts were stacked on poles after being pulled from the ground and the dirt shaken off. Regardless of age, all workers could move at their own pace. There was an inevitable daily competition, in which Rachel Clark always excelled.

Plowing mules was different. Only a few of the more dependable men were trusted to handle the draft animals and equipment, even including the rudimentary breaking of land at the beginning of each season. The ultimate achievement was in cultivating the precious crops after they began to grow. There was a lot of skill and strength involved in the precise control of plow blades as they skimmed by the tender plants, loosening the soil for increased growth and, more important, controlling the weeds and grass that could choke out the crop and prevent its bearing fruit. There was a proper way to train and control the draft animals so they could do their job and remain in good physical and mental condition. In the often stifling heat, it was easy for them to become overworked,
which could cause permanent loss of vigor or even a quick death. Mules usually had the good sense to refuse to walk as they approached this danger point of heat exhaustion, but horses, at least in this case, had much less intelligence about self-protection.

As I grew up, one of my natural ambitions was to escape from the company of other children and women in just hoeing, picking cotton, and shaking peanuts and to graduate to the exalted status of a skilled plowman who could cultivate a crop. I have to admit that, before leaving the farm for college and the navy at the age of sixteen, I never fully reached this goal—as judged by my father. My first effort at plowing was in preparing the land in our large garden plot, between our house and the workshop. This was in the wintertime, using one very docile mule named Emma, and under the supervision of Jack Clark. It was difficult to guide Emma properly, with the reins and my weak verbal orders, and the small turning plow made an erratic path through the soil—both horizontally and vertically. At least I couldn’t do any real damage, and I learned with the mistakes.

By the time I was twelve years old I was permitted to break land in the field, even using two mules with the deeper turning plows. This was one of the most boring and challenging duties that I had as a boy, but to me it was a great achievement. In a field of several acres, the first furrow—often begun before sunrise—was around the often odd-shaped periphery of the field, as close to the surrounding forests, fences, or hedgerows as possible. Clinging to the unpredictably plunging handles of the plow and struggling to guide the mules with verbal commands and the rope lines to the bridle bits was a constant challenge for my small frame and weak voice. The gait of the mules was more suited to the long steps of an adult, and sometimes I had to trot to stay up with the plow. Loud cries of “gee” and “haw” were of some help as verbal directions for my leaders to move to the right or left.

Encompassing several acres, each long circumference would advance a little less than a foot toward the center of the field. At first it would seem that this goal would never be reached, but, although slow, progress was steady and gratifying. My mind was relatively unfocused, so I was
often free for idle thoughts. A well-sharpened and balanced steel blade cutting through the soil seemed like a perfect instrument. Both physically and psychologically, I had to be in tune with the mules, accommodating their idiosyncrasies and hoping that I could prevail in most of the inevitable disagreements. There had to be a proper environment for success, involving the current weather and the effects of previous rainfall and sunshine on the soil. The comfort level was very high when all the factors were compatible. With my limited school mathematics, I would sometimes try to compute how many miles I would have to walk before completing this task and moving on to the next chore assigned by my father. Later, I would check my estimate by noting the time required and assuming that the mules and I walked an average of two miles per hour, adjusted for turning corners and brief rest periods. A day’s plowing was between twenty-two and twenty-five miles. Invariably, the drudgery was overcome by looking back at the end of a day and seeing how much cropland had been prepared for planting. I enjoyed a sense of accomplishment and self-satisfaction, knowing that I had done all that was humanly possible, even as a boy, and had left behind me the visible proof of my work.

I still have similar emotions while working in my woodshop. Periods of drudgery that come with the repetitive use of chisel, drawknife, spokeshave, plane, rasp, scraper, sandpaper, or paintbrush fade into relative insignificance when I can examine the final result of my labor. The excitement of an original design, the meticulous detail of precise measurements, accommodation of the characteristics of the chosen wood, the heft and beauty of the hand tools—some of them ancient in design—are all positive aspects of crafting a piece of furniture. I like to see what I have conceived, what I have made. The pleasure has not faded as the years have passed; in fact, my diminishing physical strength has eliminated some of the formerly competing hobbies and made woodworking and painting even more precious to me.

All of us school classmates who were farm boys became members of the Future Farmers of America when we reached the eighth grade, and one of our responsibilities was to improve the skills we had needed
and learned on the farm. For the finer aspects of woodworking, such as making furniture, the school shop was much more spacious and better equipped than the one we had at home, with instruction books, a small planing mill, a wood lathe, and glue. We had tests on identifying the various trees in our local forests and on the characteristics of their wood. We also learned how to cruise timber to estimate the value of the trees in a particular tract of land. In school I learned how to make relatively simple chairs, tables, and cabinets. My most challenging project, on which I received my final grade, was a scale model of the White House!