 |
PatchWork
by
Joyce Whitis |
Last Updated 09/06/05
Email: joy@our-town.com
My dad and I were “best buds”. As a child I tagged along with him wherever his
day took him. He was a farmer and so I went
with him to the field to plow. He took a
bale of cotton to the gin so I rode on top of that bale down a sandy road behind a team of
mules. He stopped in at Paul’s Place in
Chillicothe for a hamburger and a cold Ni-High while the cotton was being ginned. I straddled a stool and ate lunch along with the
farmers who had also brought cotton into town. At three years old, it was a time to listen
and learn. Sometime during those years I
developed a real love for the land and what it produced and what happened when it just
never did rain. I got picked up and tossed
skyward by a half-dozen cotton farmers whose daughters were too old to toss around. I collected a pocket full of pennies and nickels
that my daddy’s friends held out to me in their tanned and callused hands. My dad and me often “made the town”. We’d
leave the wagon at the gin, tie up the mules, grab a lunch at Paul’s Place and be off
for a walk down Main Street. I’d pull on
my daddy’s overall pocket until he’d go with me into that wonderland for
children known then as Simm’s Variety Store. You
could buy lots of stuff for a nickel or a dime in the ‘30’s. We’d go in and
spend some of that loose change his friends gave me, for a pink celluloid doll with real
hair or maybe a tiny fire truck. Whatever I
bought seemed to me like the greatest toy ever. I
remember jumping jacks with a painted wooden figure suspended on stiff string between two
wooden paddles. When those paddles were
pushed back and forth the “jack”, which resembled a painted clown, would hurl
himself up and over the string. It was a
fascinating thing for a child to watch. There were other farmers in town, our neighbors
who had brought cotton to the gin and they were waiting now for a check. Some waited in the shoe shop where they sat with
one shoe on and the other in the hands of the cobbler who was busy re-soleing an almost
worn-out pair of leather boots. Some took the time
to buy a few grocery items needed back at home. Bananas,
apples, oranges, stick candy, flour, sugar, and coffee were at the top of the list sent in
by the wife. I loved bananas and they were
generally on my mother’s list for Dad to fill. However
she only asked for enough to make a banana pudding on Sunday with one left over for me. I remember the day that my dad bought twice the
number of bananas my mother had written on the list. On
the way home he said, “Joyce you can eat all the bananas that you want.”
I looked in the brown paper bag and it seemed like there were dozens of yellow
bananas there. Mentally I calculated the
number that my mother would need for a Sunday banana pudding for the family. When the wagon made the last turn onto the dirt
road leading to our house with a couple of miles to travel, I started eating bananas and
throwing the skins into the ditch. By the
time we drove into the back yard, I was wishing that I had not been so greedy. That was one time that I just went on into the
house and let Dad unharness the mules and turn them into to lot without my help. Mother put a cold rag on my head while I lay back
on the living room couch and nobody mentioned bananas to me for several days. There were lots of other adventures with Dad but the one
with the bananas is one I will always remember. He
was a farmer, lover of the soil and a hard worker. He
never made much money but somehow we always had whatever we needed. When the war came, he adapted to the wartime job
of welding together Liberty and then Victory ships at Oregon Shipyard in Portland. This was a job completely foreign to him but he
did his best and became an accomplished welder. Part
of the driving force behind this was that his only son, my brother was in the Army Air
Force. He wanted to do his part on the homefront.
After the war we were all back at home but how the world had changed! No longer did we go to town in a mule drawn
wagon. We had electric lights with the pull
of a string and the outhouse out back had been replaced by indoor plumbing. We had enjoyed
radio for years and soon we had television, although we had a really hard time believing
it. Who could imagine that we could see
baseball games in our living rooms that were being played in New York City! My dad and I
went from nickel hamburgers and five-cent dolls to $10 steak dinners and $50 dolls but
somehow he always stayed the same. He died on
February 10, 1970 but there is not a day that goes by that I don’t think of him and
remember how it was to grow up in the 30’s and 40’s and how it was to follow my
dad around town. The best memory of all is
that I was always proud of my dad and that he had a reputation for being honest and that
his word was good, good as gold, they said. I grew
up during very hard times in America but the strength of the people endured. It was a great time to be alive.