Saturday, January 8, 2022

REMEMBERING MY CHILDHOOD AND MY DAD

 



What was my Dad like when I was a child? He was the same when I was not a child. He was very consistent.

 He was a product of growing up poor in the Appalachian Mountains. He, like his father, Sherman Owen,

had ridgid values and standards. He took a man's handshake or promise as valid as a written contract. He believed that a man's name and reputation was only as good as his word. He believed that hospitality was extremely important even to the extent of showing hospitality to an enemy. His attitude was to trust until he had reason not to. Sort of like fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, not very likely.

He subscribed to helping someone in need if you have the opportunity. He and I loafed (a southern tradition) often around the County. Oftentimes, we would see someone broken down. We changed tires,  pulled people out of snow or ditches, gave rides, shared food, drink or gasoline and did what we could to help. I  adopted  that philosophy as my own and have only regretted it a couple of times over my lifetime. He stressed to me that I should be skeptical with people who displayed actions of being dishonest or inconsistent. He said to me "always be aware of what is real and what's not and know your enemies.

 He stood tall at 6'3 or 6'4 and was a very strong man. He told me to not be afraid of hard work. Did he have shortcomings? Yes, everybody does. I guess one of his shortcomings was that he liked the taste of his product maybe a little too much. When he sold a bottle of whiskey, the buyer would take the cap off, smell the whiskey and then hand the bottle to my Dad. My Dad would take a drink and hand the bottle back. A few years later, I asked him about the ritual. He said it was sort of traditional. If a man won't take a drink of whiskey he is selling, the buyer has no confidence in the quality. After a good day of sales, my Dad wobbled a little when he walked. Sometimes he would take a drink and chase it with a drink of pickle juice. Try it, you will like it. 

My brother Gerald, who until he was older thought his first name was Dammit, pulled a shitty on Dad. He kept a snuff glass about half full of whiskey in the refrigerator alongside a half glass of cold water. Well, we drank the water and replaced it with whiskey. My Dad came in after a hard day's work in the woods and took out the two glasses and downed them one after the other. Well, he could not get his breath and he stumbled around in the kitchen holding onto the table and stove to stay upright. Gerald and I vacated the premises at a fast pace. 

 We lived on 8 acres. Half in corn fields and half in mountain property.  We harvested the corn and turned it into a liquid product called "moonshine" or just white likker.  On the mountain property, he had several stills over the years and produced many gallons of top notch whiskey . He sold some wholesale in gallon Coke jugs. The rest he sold out of our house in half-pints, pints, quarts, and half-gallons. He grew up alongside Diamond Creek pretty far from civilization. He attended a one-room schoolhouse and finished the 5th grade. At that time high or higher school was 6th grade through 12th grade.  By the way, I was born a young child and while I was young, my Dad worked in the woods either logging pulpwood or helping with his family business of making moonshine.

We mostly lived off the land. We had a vegetable garden which provided fresh vegetables in season and canned vegetables in the fall and winter.  We walked the roads and picked polk salad. Not too many people know that Polk Salad is toxic. To make it edible, you cook it in water, rinse it off and cook it in a frying pan with some fatback or what is called side pork or salt pork along with some scrambled eggs. We raised our chickens both for eggs and eating. We hunted squirrels, rabbits and deer.

My Uncle Robert raised hogs. Every fall, we would go to Uncle Robert's and slaughter several hogs for the extended family. The huge hogs were called white russians and their bristles were long and sharp. We used a homemade block and tackle to raise the hogs in the air and then dunk them in a huge black pot of boiling water. then we would lay the hogs on a door and scrape the bristles and hair off. Then we would dunk them again and wash off the dirt that we did not get off when we scrapped. My Grandma and several other Grandmas would take the heads and make hogshead cheese complete with gristles. You can buy this product in delis today. (Not nearly as good but edible). The good thing about a sandwich of hogshead cheese was that you got your exercise chewing the gristles. My grandma would also make lye soap and lard from the hog fat. She cut the hog skins into pieces and fried them. She would put them in her cornbread and we called the bread cracklin bread.

We collected berries from all over, blueberries, blackberries, sugar berries , huckleberries, gooseberries, mulberries, and so on for jams and jellies. We picked grapes for jelly and jam and sometimes a good grape wine. We only went to the store for staples like flour, sugar and salt. I grew up eating grits and eggs, cornbread and biscuits and pinto beans. Sometimes someone would ask my Dad how many kids he had and he would take off his fedora hat, scratch his head and say: Well there's quite a few of them. When my Dad got too old to trapz the mountains and haul stills in and out, he hired my  first cousin Willy B. to make whiskey for him. Willy was working the still when the revenuers raided the still. They handcuffed Willy B to a small sapling while they used axes and large hammers to wreck the still and furnace. Willy B. clumb  (southern word) up the sapling until it bent over and he escaped. He came off the mountain into our backyard yelling Uncle Fred, Uncle Fred.  My Dad got off the porch and asked Willy B, "what the hell are you making so much noise for? Of course Willy B. closed his eyes while my Dad took a double bladed ax and cut off the handcuffs. It took two or three weeks for us to get a new still in a different mountain stream and get a good whiskey mash going.

I remember Willy B telling about the time (years later) when he came into my Dad's stillplace and saw the muslim cloth over a mash barrel sunk douwn into the whiskey mash that he called beer mash. He said as he pulled out the cloth, out came a dead possum. Willy B said it appeared that the possum had drunk himself to death. I asked him if he dumped the mash and he looked at me as if I was crazy. He said he used the mash and roasted the possum. My Dad loved Willy B and I did too. Someone asked Willy B what the B stood for and he said no one ever told him.  Willy B's Dad was my Uncle Avery who was killed in a knife fight over a poker game. According to what I have been told, the black poker players who sliced up my Uncle Avery sort of disappeared one by one.

My Dad always displayed a gruff exterior but he had a big heart and was a push over when someone gave him a sad story. I remember once we were down by the French Broad River at my brother Mike's house. My Dad had sold a cow to an old farmer on credit. My Dad had my sister Thelma call the guy up and when Dad took the phone, he told the guy that he could use the money for the cow. The old man told my Dad that the cow had died. My Dad held his hand over the earpiece of the phone and told us: "that son-of-a-bitch said that the cow died". He then put the phone back up to his ear and said: "well if the cow died, I guess it's ok then. When he hung up the phone we told him that he covered the wrong end of the phone and the guy heard what he said. He replied well I don't give a damn.

My Dad was a fountain of knowledge and a lot of my ways were his ways. I miss him.


Hey somebody, we are out of paper here. Anyone, Toss me a corncob.

Thursday, January 21, 2021

The Devil's Courthouse

 

DEVIL'S COURTHOUSE

 

The mountains around Western North Carolina have been the setting for several movies. The most famous was Thunder Road starring Robert Mitchum and featuring Toxaway falls. Another was the Last of the Mohicans. My mother would alternate when she was mad at her 12 kids sometimes calling them Mohicans and other times referring to them as Ethiopians.

 

I grew up in those mountains fishing hunting and just exploring. I walked a lot of old Indian trails and found caves and arrowheads. I fished the rivers and streams, wandered about the canebrake, hunted squirrels, rabbits and deer. I gathered moss from old chestnut trees and found ginseng, wild flowers, Indian paintbrush, and picked mountain ivy and mistletoe.

 

The Blue Ridge Parkway is a big tourist attraction for visitors to Asheville and surrounding areas. One of the favorite hiking destinations is a place high on the Parkway named Devil's Courthouse. The Department of Interior placed a granite slab with information about the Devil' Courthouse. Legends and rumors abound in the mountains of North Carolina. There is hardly a mountain stream that has not fed water to the many whiskey stills in Western North Carolina. My Dad and my brothers had many whiskey stills in the Transylvania and Jackson County and Buncombe County areas. I hesitate to admit my involvement since I don't know the statute of limitations.

 

Devil's Courthouse  is located at the Western edge of the Pisgah National Forest about 10 miles northwest of Brevard. Cherokee legend has it that the Devil used to hold court on the large rock outcropping. There was a Cherokee story about the cave underneath Devil's Courthouse where a slant -eyed giant Jutaculla lived and danced  in the cave chambers. I don't know much about this giant except when I was younger and drinking high proof moonshine, I sometimes came across him. He carried a tomahawk on his leather throng belt and a knife larger than Jim Bowie's. He could not speak English and I could not speak giant talk but we got along O.K and we shared a few bottles of my Dad's 100 proof moonshine. We swapped some tall tales together and had a few laughs.

 

Devil's Courthouse is a mountain in the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina in the United States of America. The mountain is located at the Western edge of the Pisgah National Forest about 10 miles northwest of Brevard and 28 miles southwest of Asheville. Located at milepost 422.4 of the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Devil's Courthouse has a moderate/str…

In Cherokee lore, this cave is the private dancing chamber and dwelling place of the slant-eyed giant, Judaculla. The Cherokees call Jutaculla or Judaculla

 Tsul'kălû' which is hard to pronounce unless you have had a few drinks.

As you can expect,  one or more of the Owen family in Western North Carolina often turn up in places like Devil's Courthouse .  There was a murder at the Courthouse of a girl called Wendy Owen which is another story for another time. Judaculla was allegedly spotted around Haywood , Jackson and Transylvania Counties. Legend has it that he liked to spend a lot of time at Tanasee Bald.

I have never figured out why the Devil had to hold court because by the time he gets a hold of you, your are already guilty. Maybe he watched the Judge Roy Bean movie with Walther Brennen. My favorite scene from that movie was when the Judge asked why a man was brought before him and he was told the man stole a horse. Roy Bean said to the man: "I sentence you to die at daybreak" Oh, by the way how do you plead." That scene always reminded me the Brevard Courthouse.

If you do travel up the Blue Ridge Parkway to Devil's Courthouse , do it in the daytime and be careful. Around dusk is usually when the slant eyed giant is wandering about. If you do happen to see Judaculla, ask him if he remembers our drinking bouts.

See Picture below.




Saturday, November 14, 2020

Hurdles



HURDLES


Life will hand you hurdles. So, you might ask: What are hurdles? Basically, hurdles are challenges to test your ability to survive until you die. Another way of looking at hurdles is to view then as obstacles. If you have served in the military and run an obstacle course you are aware that when you reach a hurdle or an obstacle that you can's just stop and starve to death. You have to find a way to jump over, go under or around or figure out how to remove the obstacle or hurdle.

When you start out as a small child as I did, usually your Mother will handle the hurdles for you but sooner or later, you have to handle them for yourself. If you are the kind of person to take the road less traveled, you will quickly become familiar with hurdles.

I was born a young child without a lot of responsibilities. I did not have to ask for hurdles as they were handed to me. Before long, I was hoeing the garden, chopping wood, hauling water from the spring, feeding animals, churning milk to make butter, chasing down chickens for supper, watching for poisonous snakes, picking grapes, blueberries and blackberries, beans, pulling up onions, carrots and fishing or hunting for squirrels, rabbits, deer and other wild animals to help feed the family. 

The things I learned to do as I grew up in a large family with 12 brothers and sisters gave me a head start on surviving and overcoming hurdles. I joined the Navy at 17 and I was amazed when they gave me two pair of shoes and free clothes to wear. I remember lying in my bunk at night and hearing other 17 or 18 year old recruits sobbing and regretting volunteering . I was already pretty fit from working on a farm but I did gain some muscle weight from the constant marching and running with a rifle all over the Navy Training Center in San Diego. I enjoyed the shooting range. I did not enjoy the gas chamber where they subjected me to tear gas. At first I thought that my four year enlistment would be like boot camp but when I graduated and received my first set of orders to Naval Air Facility Litchfield Park just outside of Phoenix, Arizona, I was pleasantly surprised. I was treated as a human being instead of as a maggot. I was assigned a job in an aviation warehouse where I managed receipt, storage and issued aircraft parts to repair aircraft. At that time, my base was the winter home for the Blue Angels. They flew the McDonnel Douglas A4 Attack aircraft. 

NAF Litchfield Park was pretty easy as far as hurdles went. Every morning I would get up, shave and shower and go to breakfast. The chow hall was close to the barracks so I would stop and have a breakfast before walking to work at the warehouse. I could order eggs, pancakes, toast, bacon, sausage or whatever struck my fancy and I did not have to pay for the food. One of my favorites was the chocolate milk dispenser. I also enjoyed the fresh fruit, especially the oranges and bananas.

I was pretty much in hog heaven at my first duty station. I was scheduled to go to Memphis, Tennessee to attend Aviation Electronic School but just before I was scheduled to leave I was in an Automobile accident where I suffered severe lacerations and a compound fracture of my left leg just above the ankle. I had a hurdle at that point as the doctors wanted to amputate my foot as there was no bone holding it to my leg, just some tissue and muscle. I told them if it rotted off, I would deal with that but if they tried to remove my foot, then there would be hell to pay.

At any rate, they saved the foot and took skin from my thigh and did skin grafts to cover the open bone. I still just have skin over my lower leg but I got over that hurdle. However, when my school date started, I was hobbling around on crutches. I was told that I missed my opportunity to become an Aviation Electronic Technician. I was pissed about that but around that time I saw a notice on my work bulletin board encouraging sailors to volunteer to go to Viet Nam. You guessed it, I signed up to volunteer and was sent to Lemoore Naval Air Station in California. I was assigned to Attack Squadron 125 for training purposes to become a plane captain. The days were long and hard. I learned to wash, fuel and lubricate several types of aircraft and how to pre-flight the planes prior to take off. Litchfield Park Naval Air Facility was a walk in the park compared to my new 12-16 hour work days. I finally was certified to be a plane captain for A4 aircraft and was given orders to my favorite attack squadron, Attack Squadron 144. Our mascot oddly enough was the Roadrunner.







 

THE BEAR AND THUNDER ROAD

I have regaled you with some of my childhood memories growing up in the foothills of the Great Smokey Mountains. As you know I was born a young child with a full set of teeth and a full coat of hair. While Davy Crockett killed him a bear when he was only 4 years old, my encounter with a bear was at the tender age of 3. I was hunting squirrels for supper with my Dad's 22 rifle. He would give me three or 4 shells and tell me to bring back 3 or 4 squirrels. If I brought back less, he wanted to know what happened with the extra bullet. Anyway to the bear. I came around a giant oak tree about a mile from my Dad's whiskey still and tripped over a black bear napping behind the tree. As you can imagine, we were both surprised and startled.  We became entangled with each other and since we were on a slope, we started rolling downhill asshole to elbow, each holding to the other. As we neared the bottom of the hill, nearby observers (other hunters) spread the story that I was wrestling with the bear. We collided with a Sassafras tree which stopped the downhill tumble. The bear got up and stood on its hind legs and so did I. He reached out his paw and I shook it and we went our separate ways. Some might tell this story differently but I was there and I know that it was, for the most part, an innocent encounter. No blood was shed. At any rate, you will just have to believe what you will. 

My first cousin Willy B tells a story where he run into a bear while in the woods. When asked why he didn't shoot the bear he said: "I did not have a gun and it was not loaded." Willy B was known to stretch the truth from time to time.

Now, nine years later in 1958 my sisters, Thelma and Estelle asked me to drive them to Lake Toxaway since neither of them had a driver's license. My Dad was in his liquor still working so I  short wired his 1941 Chevrolet coupe and away we went. Now Lake Toxaway is best known for its spectacular waterfall called Toxaway Falls. 

In 1958 Robert Mitchem was starring in a movie called Thunder Road and they were filming a scene where Robert Mitchem with a full load of moonshine "left the road at 90" while being chased by Revenooers. The movie showed his car going off the road and down the Toxaway Waterfalls. When we got there, Robert Mitchem was having lunch with some of the camera crew and of course my sisters went right up to him and asked for his autograph. I was busy checking out the blonde girl at the lunch cart. She smiled at me and darned if it didn't look like she had all her teeth. She motioned me over and gave me a sandwich and a bottle of coca-cola. We talked and she asked me for my telephone number. I sheepishly told her that I didn't have a telephone or a number. She smiled and said: "I guess I will just have to send you messages by smoke signal." I never saw her again but every once in awhile over the next few years, I looked toward Toxaway Falls just in case she was sending me a signal.

For those of you who have not seen the movie Thunder Road, I would recommend it. It does stretch the truth a mite but it still depicts the way of life in Western North Carolina in the '50s.  Course none of the cars we used to haul moonshine for my Dad would go 90 miles an hour and we just hauled the hooch in the trunk of the car in one-gallon coke jugs mostly at night time.

Note: 

Thunder Road is a black and white 1958 drama–crime film directed by Arthur Ripley and starring Robert Mitchum, who also produced the film and co-wrote the screenplay. With Don Raye, Mitchum co-wrote the theme song, "The Ballad of Thunder Road." The film features Gene Barry and Jacques Aubuchon. The film's plot concerns running moonshine in the mountains of Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina in the late 1950s. Thunder Road became a cult film and continued to play at drive-in movie theaters in some southeastern states. 


Monday, March 30, 2020

REMEMBERING WHILE I CAN

I am 73 and will soon be 74 with no idea how I got this old. Sometimes when I wake up I have to stop and think, where did the years go? I go to the bathroom and see a grey-headed old man looking back at me. I have some friends with dementia and I know that I am not immune. So I thought I would recount some of my memories. I have told my kids that life is a journey. Along that journey, you run across obstacles in your path. You can turn back and try another path or you can face the obstacles and figure how to overcome them by going over, under, around or through them. You are competing with other people for your quality of life. I have always chosen to attack the obstacles and move forward. I haven't always made the best choice but early on, I realized that since life is a journey of obstacles, I hand to learn how to be tough. My motto has always been: Never Give Up. My second motto is: Whatever is Necessary. So, while I still can remember, I want to share some of my memories with my family.

                                                      The Many-Legged Chicken

I was born a young child as some of you know from some of my previous stories. My Mama and Daddy had a total of 13 children a combination of the good, the bad and the ugly (not me). At any one time, there were at least 8 or 9 around the supper table. Just because we were poor, we did not want for food. We raised a garden and fields of corn. We canned the food from the garden. We ate grapes growing along the creek bed. We picked berries of every variety, We hunted squirrels, rabbits, groundhogs, deer and we either raised a hog for winter meat or helped Uncle Robert to slaughter several Russian Hogs each fall and he shared with us. We fished in the creek by our house and the French Broad River. My Mama always had a pot of pinto beans on the wood stove and in the overhead of the stove, she kept a stash of biscuits and cornbread.  We walked the road banks and picked Polk salad that Mama cooked with scrambled eggs from our chickens. Well, the chickens did not scramble the eggs, we did.  We had a milk cow. We used a milk churn to make our own butter and buttermilk. We raised corn and converted it to 100 proof whiskey (moonshine). So, We didn't know we were poor. We felt fortunate to have what we had. We had a cold mountain stream coming close to the house and we kept out milk in what we called the spout branch. The cold water kept the milk cold and provided us with the best drinking water that I have ever tasted. We had an outhouse down the hill from our house and a flashlight for those trips after dark. We had a wood heater in the living room and we cut firewood from the well-treed 8 acres that my Daddy owned. Life was a series of daily chores with a break once in a while for a picnic of Chicken and Mama's homemade potato salad and a gallon of Kool-aid. Mama made grape and berry jellies and jams. We would buy peaches from roadside stands that were trucked up from Georgia and Mama would can the peaches and my Grandma would make peach preserves (the best). We had a bank house off the side of the house to store canned goods and a side of bacon. We walked along the gravel roads in the County and gathered whiskey bottles. My mama would wash and disinfect the bottles and fill them with moonshine for sale. A half-pint cost 75 cents and a pint cost $2.00 up until the Cuban Crisis and we had to raise the price because sugar was scarce and costs a lot more than normal. We worked on some of the big farms stringing wire for green beans to grow and when they grew, we went back and picked them by the bushel for 50 cents a bushel. Our clothes had patches but every year we got a couple of new outfits for the school year. In the summertime, we went barefoot and that saved on shoe costs. When Mama went to the store, she picked up salt, pepper, flour and not much more.  I often think of those times and I wish that I could relive those moments. Eventually, our life got more modern with electricity, a refrigerator and a small black and white TV. We kept the kerosene lamps for power outages.

Anyway to get back to the many leged Chicken. We did not always have meat with our meals but sometimes we would have chicken along with pinto beans and collard greens. Since the chicken gizzard was reserved for my Daddy and the chicken legs were reserved for the younger kids, I usually ended up with a thigh or a wing. As the older kids left home, I longed for the time when I would get a chicken leg. One day, when there were only four of us kids left at home, I knew that I would finally get a chicken leg. I was anxious. Mama fried up some chicken and passed the pieces around. The two youngest kids got legs. I asked Mama, where are the other legs? She said, "Son, a chicken only has two legs."  I was in disbelief because many times I had seen 4 legs passed around. I got up from the supper table and went out onto the back porch and looked at the chickens walking around on two legs. What a puzzle. Mama explained. When more kids were at home, she cooked two chickens. I will never forget that day when I realized that  Chickens only have two legs.

More vivid memories to come. Stay tuned. 

Friday, June 15, 2018

                            The Prison Story and the Family Relocation to Oregon


When my Daddy, Fred Owen, was sentenced to one year and one day in Federal Court for not paying taxes on his moonshine, he was sent to a Federal Prison in Atlanta, Georgia. By the way there is no way that Georgia Moonshine can compare to my Daddy's whiskey.

We had no income while Daddy was in prison. We subsisted on canned goods, garden vegetables and what game we could catch or shoot. We ate squirrels, groundhogs, rabbits, deer and other animals too slow to get away. Uncle Robert gave us a big Russian Hog for winter meat. We had an old Jersey cow for a milk cow. We made our own butter and butter milk. My Mother always found a way to put food on the table along with either biscuits or corn bread.
Sometimes a meal would consist of a bowl of buttermilk and cornbread broken into the bowl.

One staple was pinto beans which we referred to as "soup beans". When I got married, I asked Anita to go to the store to pick up some soup beans and she came back empty handed. "I searched every pack of beans in the store and they did not have soup beans" said she. I went to the store with her and pointed out the bag of pinto beans. She still argues that the package did not say "soup beans" which is a minor technicality. Sometimes my Daddy would just spoon the soup from the beans and have the soup with cornbread. My brother Charles would mash the pinto beans up on his plate and mash homemade butter into the beans. To this day when I see a can of what is called "refried beans", I think of Charles.

Without Daddy, my Mother took over management of the 12 children or at least tried. It would be kind to describe us as manageable. Charles, as the oldest of the clan was appointed as the family Sheriff by Mama. He would run down whichever kid needed a whupping and deliver him or her to Mama for the application of a hickory switch. 

At any rate, without the income from selling of Daddy's whiskey, our food and resources dwindled. 

My sister Thelma and my brother-in-law Henson packed us all into a green and white Chrysler and took us to Oregon. What a long and tiresome trip that was with kids stacked to the ceiling of the Chrysler from the floorboard up. Several days later we arrived in Westport, Oregon. Thelma and Henson put us up in a beautiful home that set at the foot of Nicoli Mountain.
They bought the house and several acres from Earnie, the store owner in Westport. Mama went to Earnie's store and asked him where the grits were located. He gave her a strange look  and asked : "what are grits". Well the store started carrying grits. My brother Gerald was with Mama at the store and as he was exploring the store goods, he turned a corner and ran into the bread man who dropped his crates of bread on the floor. As he was picking up the bread, he said to Gerald, "excuse me" and Gerald blurted out "Thank you".

To call Gerald a rascal would be an understatement. At that time we both loved peanut butter and we were racing to the house to get some peanut butter. Gerald beat me to the house, grabbed the peanut butter jar and scooped about 4 tablespoonfuls of into his mouth and tried to swallow. Well, that much peanut butter is hard to swallow. He got a strange look on his fact and started turning blue as he grabbed his throat. I called Mama who rushed in the kitchen and almost beat him to death as she slapped him on the back until enough of the peanut butter went down so he could breath again. I don't think he has had peanut butter since. 

We survived Oregon by picking berrys, stringing bean fields, picking beans and strawberries. We would never have survived without Thelma and Henson's help.

Gerald and I were climbing an English Walnut tree when we saw a strange car coming up the drive. It was a taxicab. We were totally shocked when Daddy climbed out of the taxicab. He was carrying an old brown suitcase and he looked awful tired. He had spent a year and one day in prison and here he was in Oregon after a long train ride and a taxi cab ride. He told Gerald and I to go and get Mama and tell her to bring some money to pay the taxi cab man. We started to climb the hill to the house but we saw Mama running down the hill  flapping her apron up to her face and crying. I could never stand to see my Mama cry so  I shed a tear too. We were finally a family back together again.
Burdens are a blessing!.