Blue Ridge Country - September/October 2013 - 53

for church, putting on her three dresses, one atop the
other. And lots of clothing in a huge handbag.
Sitting on the back row of the country church with
her parents, she heard the clip-clop of his rented horse’s
hooves as he passed the little church and went up the
road to turn around.
When she heard the hooves approaching again, this
time headed back toward town, she bailed out the back
door of the church, ran down the steps and climbed
into the buggy.
They drove to town and the magistrate’s office,
where they were officially married that day.
“I was a fireman back then, shoveling coal on a line
up in Kentucky – working on a 2-4-2,” he told me
once. “You know what a 2-4-2 is, don’t you?”
I’d say no sir, I can barely tell a White from a
Freightliner if I’m close enough to read the nameplate.
Or a Ford from a Chevy if I can make out the
bowtie.
He would patiently explain that the 2-4-2 denotes
the location of the steering and driving wheels on a
steam locomotive of a certain model. And that some
had short square fireboxes and others long narrow
fireboxes.
His job, of course, was to send shovelfuls of coal
into the firebox to keep the steam process going, standing on the metal floor of a swaying, jerking engine
hurtling maybe 70 miles an hour through curvy
terrain.
Later on, like many other mountain folk, he got an
industrial job in Ohio. At the Timken Roller Bearing
Company. He always said the full name proudly when
he told me those stories. I helped him cut firewood for
the winter just to hear his stories.
Sometime during the ‘30s and FDR, he came home
to the Carolina mountains and attempted to get a
“government job” with a WPA project, or something
very similar. A daughter provides the details.
“Daddy was a Republican and everybody knew it.
But Momma’s people were all Democrats and some of
them were running the hiring office. We thought
Daddy would be okay because of who he was married
to. We were wrong.”
She said he went to his wife’s relatives with both his
pride and hat in his hand and asked for the public job.
They said no, right there in the courthouse. Sent him
home in humility.
Somehow with working as a carpenter and a farmer,
he put food on the table. A mentally-challenged
younger brother was added to the household early and
taken on as a lifetime assignment, in addition to the
regular family.
He took his religion seriously and, although a GOP

voter, he got mad at the way the media treated
President Jimmy Carter’s good born-again Baptist
faith.
Saturdays used to be lively in town, with lots more
street preachers than today. He said years ago one of
his friends came up to him and said “Man, I just heard
the very best preacher in my life.”
He said he asked the friend what was the man’s
Scripture reference, what was the sermon topic? No
answer. Then he said his friend finally told what had
impressed him so.
“Don’t know what he was preaching about, don’t
remember. But, man, that guy could stand in one place
and jump higher than any man I ever saw.”
We got the firewood cut and split and his married
children each donated some money and bought the
old couple a brand-new Ashley wood heater. They’d
stoke it full of dry hardwood and sit back and bask in
the cherry-red glow.
The heat was intense but they loved it, even with
visitors stripped down to their T-shirts and the front
door of the house left wide open in January.
He’d tell Irish jokes he learned 40 years ago in
Ohio, all featuring Pat and Mike. And his bride, who
had heard the same jokes for generations,would slap
her leg and lead the laughter.
The conversation was often about gardening and
he sometimes told funny stories about himself and his
failing eyesight.
“Had a nice little row of tomato plants growing,”
he said. “And a dad burn weed had sprouted right in
the middle of the row, spaced out just right so it looked
like a young tomato plant. At least to me it did.”
He said he tended those young green plants on his
hands and knees, already in his 80s, crawling up and
down the row until the day he identified and destroyed
the offending ragweed.
“You work too fast trying to get the job over with,”
he always told me. “You’ll burn yourself out that way.
Got to learn to pace yourself – stop and smoke and
talk and visit.”
He always smoked a pipe filled with Prince Albert
tobacco and he was always careless with it. Wore bib
overalls burned many times with flaming bits of
tobacco or dropped glowing matches.
“Don’t set yourself on fire,” I’d warn him. “Tell me
again about the time you walked home from
Gainesville, Georgia by yourself…just 12 years old
and three days alone traveling through these ancient
mountains…”
Just eight years before that elopement day. To begin
a union that would last 71 years, bearing five children
and countless grandchildren. 

Blue Ridge Country - September/October 2013

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