White Milk Barns    by Charles Cunningham  

                                      a story I wrote to the paper in Nashville in the Ticked Off section   

I am ticked off because of all of the white milk barns in Green Hills and Forest Hills with no milk cows. I grew up in rural Tennessee when agricultural was toward the end of its economic era. During the 20s through the 50s most farms in the area were small and everyone had milk cows and sold the raw milk to either Borden’s are Kraft to receive a monthly “milk check”. Often, milking in the 50s was a break even proposition but the “milk check” would get you through the winter. The milk truck full of “milk cans” was a common scene on country roads twice every day to pick up the milk from the farm and transport it to the processor. 

To sell the milk, you had to meet certain cleanness standards including having the milk barn painted white or white washed. Most of the farm houses during that period were raw clap board as there was an old saying in the south “to proud to white wash and to poor to paint”. A few of the farms that were owned by well to do farmers had homes that were brick and were never painted so as not to mistake them for painted clap board house or a milk barn.

It seems from my travels, that in the northern part of the US there are very few brick farm homes and as they had money, all of their clap board farm homes are painted white. I suppose now that we have all of the people arriving in Nashville from the rust belt, they are trying to make their homes look like what they left behind by painting very nice brick homes white. The only time a brick home is painted in the south is after an addition is made to the house and the brick doesn’t match.

I just thought I would write this short bit of southern history so that our northern friends that move south could understand why we think a brick house painted white looks like a concrete milk barn of the 50s, especially the houses with a Gamble roof.

I am even more ticked off because I thought I had moved up by living in the city; however, with all the white milk barns, I wonder if I am living with a bunch of share croppers with white washed milk barns.

Charles Cunningham 2016

The Bowl Haircut                  by Charles Cunningham  1942-20xx

Growing up in a small town in the South in the 1950’s was really exciting for me as my family had just moved from a tiny farm town, about 200 people, in the country to Fayetteville, Tn; a town of about 7000. 

I was about 12 years old and the family would go back on Sunday to the little burg, Belleville, to visit family and friends and I would always play in the Norris creek with my cousin Bobby.  

There was only one gathering place in the small burro, Chapman’s Store; the only retail place around and they sold everything from horse shoes to bologna and you could by a single plug of tobacco.

Anyway the front of the store had a covered porch about 5 feet wide and the concrete landing that was about one foot off the ground.  Older men would sit in a line on the wooden drink boxes and lean back against the concrete block wall, talk about crops, plowing, putting hay in the barn and spitting tobacco into the gravel in the front of the store.  What was so special about Sunday was that the men and boys that needed a hair cut would show up at the store and sit on a wooden milk carton near the edge of the porch and my Uncle Grady would cut their hair with a pair of manually operated clippers.  

 These devices had a clipper head about one inch wide and handles that when squeezed would cycle and cut hair.  Most of the guys just wanted the trim and Uncle Grady would just cut the sides and not fool with the top hair much.  Whoever was getting the hair cut would always get the criticism and input from the drink box gallery such as “I’ve seen better looking heads on nickel beers”. The end result looked much like the men’s hair does that are popular today in the 2018s; in the 1950s this type of cut was know as a bowl hair cut as it resembled placing a bowl upside down on a guys head and trimming only the sides.  At the time this would identify you as a person from the country “country hay seed” and not “city slicker” or town guy who had paid money for a haircut.

I guess my thoughts on the popular hair-do of today confirms “what goes around comes around”.

by Charles Cunningham

It was during the fall of 1983 when my mother called and said “Well Uncle John has passed away and you and Judy should go down to the funeral “.  Up until that point, everyone in the family had decided that Uncle John might outlive everyone in the family as he had one of the first pacemakers ever to be installed when he was about 63; and was now 88 when he had passed on. I had only been to his home once in my lifetime and that was when I was 5 years old.  I was now 45 years old so I was not familiar with Atmore, Alabama other than I knew it was just off the east side of I-65 almost in Florida. 

Uncle John had moved his family, one son, and wife to Atmore sometime around the time of the great depression; not sure why.  Atmore is a small town in south Alabama with a railroad switch system in the middle of town, a few stores on either side of the tracks and I think there is a state prison there.

 Uncle John had sold insurance and had a real estate business in Atmore.  He was my father’s second oldest brother and he would come back home to see his sister, my Aunt Ruthie, about once every two years; kind of unusual for anyone to visit Fayetteville for any reason.  They would also visit with my mother and father until my father passed on in 1979.

I remember Uncle John as one of those people that talked all of the time even if no one were listening; kind of one of those nasal voices that put you to sleep as you really did not know any of the people or places he would be talking about.  His son Kenneth who was about 15 years older than me had either inherited or taken up the trait of endless talking.  My father was a quiet type but my Aunt Ruthie was a school teacher and could keep up with the endless talking of Uncle John. You know both talking at the same time about different things; I think.

To make it to the funeral the next day, I went to the Nashville airport early and rented a big Lincoln to drive to Atmore as my car was a bit small if I were to have others in the car for the long drive.  Fortunately, my sister and her husband had left early that day and had taken my mother and Aunt Ruthie so I did not have that responsibility.

After a long drive down I-65, Judy and I arrived in Atmore about two hours before the funeral service and I was appointed as one of the pallbearers which I said “OK – what car do I get in after the service”.  Well, after the funeral service, all the pallbearers were told to get into the second car behind the hearse that would follow the police escort.

I got in the appointed car but it was cramped, some person I did not know was driving and Kenneth was riding up front. In the back seat was my brother in law, Kenneth’s two teenage sons, along with me. I was stuck kind of sideways in the right rear of the seat.  The car behind us was the Minister who was driving, Aunt Elton, John’s wife, and Lucy, Kenneth’s wife. My wife was driving the second car behind us; it was the big Lincoln with my sister, my mother, and Aunt Ruthie. I had no clue as to where we were going; the hearse was just following the police car.  

Just a bit of background, Atmore is located just north of the Florida pan handle and the journey to the cemetery as I later found out required going back and forth across the two state lines about three times on unmarked gravel and tar roads through canyons of very tall loblolly pine forest.  Anyway, at the first state line crossing, the Atmore police car pulled over and we were on the way without an escort.  

After about 45 minutes of riding on gravel-tar roads in the uncomfortable position and listening to Kenneth ramble on and on about this and that, I realized the road was now just a gravel road, I turned and looked out the back car window to discover there was no procession behind us. I quickly quipped, “Kenneth there is no procession behind us”. At this point it took a while for Kenneth to make the decision we were going the wrong way plus it took even more time honking at the hearse to get the driver’s attention to stop.  Once stopped, Kenneth jumped out and conversed with the driver of the hearse.  Back in the car we had to continue to drive about another ½ mile to find a place to turn the long hearse around and head back the way we had come.

We had missed the crucial turn off, to the country cemetery about 10 miles back.  When we did get to the cemetery it was a real country type location with the honeysuckle and kudzu grown up over everything.  The cemetery was actually only about 40 yards from the road where we passed by earlier; but, you really could not see it from the road.  All of the people that had been in the procession were standing around waiting at the grave site and according to my wife were ready to clap at the site of the hearse as they had been waiting over 30 minutes in the south Alabama heat. As I understood later, they were relieved in more than one way to see the hearse arrive.

At the cemetery, my wife, Judy, told me the minister, who was driving the car in front of her in the procession, had just stopped his car in the middle of the gravel road; jumped out and told her to follow him as the cemetery was just to the left.  Judy told me “I just watched the car with you and the hearse with Uncle John ramble on down the gravel road”. On the way back to Nashville, Judy told me that Aunt Ruthie had to submit to the call of nature after waiting so long for the hearse with the body to arrive at the grave. There were no rest rooms for miles so my sister had just pointed to the brushes and Aunt Ruthie had just disappeared behind the honeysuckle and kudzu bushes for a time.

A little more detail to this story.  Everyone had just thought the episode with loosing Uncle John on the way to the cemetery to be a bit humorous; but, I later learned it had obviously really embarrassed Kenneth severely.  He passed on a few years back and at the funeral home; I was given a very detailed map he had drawn on how to get to the same cemetery.  Also the funeral home director told me Kenneth had gone over the map and location with him several times before his death and wanted to make sure the same lost corpse episode did not happen again with him. 

Thank goodness for the invention of GPS systems and cell phones.

Shotgun Accident at the Wright Home Place

Dexter and Charles

We had gotten a late start on our hunting because we both lived in town, Fayetteville, Tennessee and my father had carried us to the country, Belleville, Tennessee to the old Wright home place to start our hunting for the day. 🚜

 We were both about fourteen or fifteen years old. I had driven the tractor to the top of the ridge on the rutted abounded road. Dexter had ridden on the drawbar of the tractor with the shotguns.   🚜🧑‍🦯  We had opened the gate into a small pasture and had been searching on foot for either rabbits🐇 or squirrels🐿️ without much luck. Being about mid day the rabbits had taken cover and the squirrels had retired for later in the afternoon to scamper about.  We finally decided to just head back to the house for lunch and maybe hunt later in the afternoon.

On the way back down the hill, I had stopped the tractor because of a grove of scaly bark hickory trees on the farm side and the old stone fence on both sides of the old road bed looked like a good place for both rabbits🐇🐇 and squirrels.  Just as I got the tractor stopped and was starting to get off, I was startled by the sound of the 12 gauge shotgun firing.

 I think the whistle of the bird shot flying past my head may have been first.  Before the gun shot had registered in my mind, I felt Dexter falling against my back and muttering the words “I’m hit”.  When I looked around, Dexter was kind of leaning on the right fender of the ford tractor but not saying anything. I managed to get off the tractor in an instant.

He had his back to me as I raced around the big left side rear tractor tire.  He had worn his new red and gray letter jacket that day.  The first thing I saw was a huge ragged hole, about 14 inches top to bottom and about 8 inches wide in the back of the red  jacket just off to the right of center.  My first thought was how was he standing up with that hole in his jacket, it had to be in his back as well.  Dexter had always been a tough, tall wiry kid, but, he was getting real pale looking and I was really scared as to what the severity of the injury was, he began to groan just a bit as I grabbed him turned him around and unzipped his coat and tore open his shirt which was basically missing on the right side.

When I looked at Dexter’s chest, it was a terrible sight.  It looked like someone had used an exacto knife and just cut the first layer of skin in a ragged pattern on his right side and then just ripped the skin from his body.  His chest was a sticky red mess like someone may have put some real sticky tape on him and then just yanked it off taking the hide with the tape.

I do remember that getting to the old home-place would be the next most important thing because I didn’t know what to do.  I don’t really remember how I got Dexter back standing on the drawbar of the tractor, but somehow I remember holding his upper body or left arm with my right arm as I was afraid he might pass-out and fall from the tractor.  I was in the seat on the tractor and I don’t remember what happened to the guns we each had.  I do remember getting the tractor in second gear and taking off steering the tractor with my left hand.  I was left handed so this was the way to work the situation.

The trip down the hill was more than a little dangerous as I should have been in first gear at a slow walking speed instead of second gear.  This was like a fast jog bouncing over the big rocks in the road; they had fallen at random from the old stone fence over time. The road was actually just two gullies where the tire tracks would have been with a stone fence on both sides. It was called “Wright Road”; no one actually used the road for vehicles.

When we finally got down to the old home place, I raced in the house and was trying to explain to his grandmother “Aunt Ailene”, as to what had happened. She almost went into a panic as she went outside and was trying to determine the extent of the injury to Dexter.  She was having the same problem as I had had, “how was he walking around with that terrible looking wound and the giant hole in the back of his jacket”.  

She quickly rounded up her husband, Dexter’s grandfather, Uncle Grady, and told him to get the car ready that we had an emergency and needed to get to the county hospital quickly. Aunt Ailene and the Wright family were no strangers to tragic accidents.  She had lost a young son, JD, in a fire accident and everyone was not sure she had ever gotten over that even though the accident had happened many years earlier. The son, JD was a teenager working with a fire and had some gasoline nearby which exploded and he had actually burned alive in the front yard of the old home place.  Also, Uncle Grady’s two sisters husbands , Tom and Sue had suffered fatal injuries.  Aunt Sue’s husband, had a logging accident where a log had rolled over him and he was killed a few years back. His other sister, my grandmother, Tom, had also had tragic accidents as her husband had been dragged to death by a run-away mule  in his thirties and her only son, Frank, had passed away at thirty something due to a medical accident when he was thirty something.  My mother was only thirteen when her father was killed by the mules.  And my father’s old home place, a big two story house, just down the road had burned when he was young because one of his sisters had turned over an oil lamp and had been burned alive in the house fire.

Dexter had always lived in town, Fayetteville, and rarely went hunting, when he did, he would have to borrow Uncle Bill’s old pump shot gun.  On that day, it was in the fall of the year and most of the farm chores for the season had been done so Uncle Bill and Uncle Sam, both old bachelors were in the front room reading paperbacks as they did in the wintertime.  They were both sitting in front of the coal burning fire place in the front room.  Uncle Bill always sat leaned back in a rocking chair with his feet propped on the mantle so he could spit his tobacco in the fire. Uncle Sam was always sitting in his chair bent over with his legs crossed with the book close to his glasses. Uncle Sam was also the one that would poker at the fire occasionally.  Aunt Ailene had always run the house and had cooked for her husband and his two brothers, Bill and Sam; they all lived in the same old house.  It was the old Wright farm house.  My grandmother had grown up in this house plus Dexter’s mother had also grown up in the house as the next generation with her sister and two brothers; I am not sure when her brother, JD, was burned; one of those things no one ever talked about.

For me, I would visit the old Wright home place with my mother, Elise; she was the visiting type maybe because she had such little family.  I had worked for my Uncle Bill and Uncle Sam in the summer as had all the other grand nieces and nephews, thinning the peaches in the orchard, picking strawberries in the patch, hauling hay, and other odd jobs.  They always paid us for our help. 

The uncles had always enjoyed all the kids👪👪 around the home place as did Aunt Ailene. 🧑‍🍳   I can remember in her dining room that was huge, about 14 X 20 feet, there was always a big plate with a glass cover dish full of “Tea Cakes” in the far corner of the room.   Some of them would have chocolate icing and some a white icing; and some had neither; they were really good and a real treat; we could always get one when we went in the house.

For that hunting day, I had my old single shot, shot gun that my dad had given me several years earlier for rabbit and squirrel hunting.  My mother and dad had a farm up the road, and my dad and I had been hunting together for several years; I had several beagle hound dogs for rabbit hunting. 

My dad was never big on hunting but I was because me and another cousin on my dad’s side of the family, “Bobby” went hunting or fishing almost every Sunday afternoon.  He lived just up the road past our farm near the Norris creek.      When Dexter was getting Uncle Bill’s shotgun and shells, Uncle Bill had asked where we were going and we indicated up on the ridge near the old peach orchid.  He had said,” why not take the tractor”. 

The tractor was a fairly new 1953 Ford Golden Jubilee; it had a tachometer and several other gauges; real new design plus overhead valves on the four cylinder engine for increased horsepower.  I jumped at this offer as I had only gotten to drive this tractor a few times when setting out tobacco and it was really nice compared to the old tractors I had been driving on my dad and mother’s farm.  This tractor was the one thing that probably was a real bad idea. It was new to us hunting and did not mix well with the old shot guns. 

What had caused the old pump shot gun to accidentally fire was a result of the gun falling from the tractor while we were stopped. The exposed hammer on the gun had hit the tractor’s draw bar as it was falling downward. The draw bar is a heavy piece of steel,  three feet long, about three inches wide, and one and a half inches thick with several holes and is positioned about twelve inches off the ground for attaching various farm implements.  Dexter had been standing on the draw bar and his arms were spread wide apart holding onto the rear gray colored fenders of the tractor while we were going up the hill and back down to the house.  

The old pump shot gun had a shuttle system that pushed the hammer to the cocked position when the gun was pumped or cycled for the next shot which also unloaded the old shell and loaded a new shell in the firing chamber. Something that was straight forward but we had not thought of that as a safety issue as most shot guns at that time already had an enclosed hammer. If we had been using a new type shotgun, the accident would have never happened.

Well, Aunt Aileen got her husband, Grady, moving much faster than usual. He got the green 1955 Roadmaster Buick started, turned it around and was ready for the trip to the Fayetteville hospital fairly quick.  We got Dexter into the back seat and I got in with him. Aunt Ailene got in the front seat with Uncle Grady. After we got going, she kept on talking to Uncle Grady “you’ve got to drive faster, Dexter has been shot”, but faster was only about 55 MPH.  During the trip, Dexter was conscious but looking really pale by this time; his shirt was open and the new Letter Jacket was still on but the wound was exposed.  I remember on the way to the hospital, a house fly kept buzzing his terrible looking bloody chest and Dexter was trying to keep the fly off the bloody wound.  Apparently the very raw meat was sensitive and he was trying to keep the fly away.  This may have kept him conscious.  Also, the Letter Jacket could have been one of the things that contributed to Dexter’s luck that unlucky day.

Dexter was a good athlete and had been wearing his brand new red and gray letter jacket for his football skills.  When he was holding on to the tractor fenders and when the gun had discharged, the pellets from the gun blast had forced the red felt of the letter jacket into the wound and probably stopped a lot of bleeding that would have otherwise been a real problem.

We finally got to the County Hospital and Dexter was carried, I think he walked to the emergency room.  I don’t remember if his mother had gotten there when the Doctor came out from the operating room and relayed the situation to Aunt Ailene and Uncle Grady.  The doctor, Dr Patrick, said that Dexter had been very lucky and that he had removed most of the pellets from Dexter’s chest, but that a few were too close to his lung to remove. The actual blast had only missed his lung by a fraction of an inch. I am sure Dexter knows exactly how many pellets he still has in his chest.

Dexter still lives in our hometown, Fayetteville, Tennessee; he graduated from UT with an Engineering Degree, married and has three grown daughters. He is a retired Marine Officer and was severely injured by a grenade in Vietnam.  Later after many years of service with NASA , in Huntsville, Alabama, Dexter retired as a Systems Engineer.  We see each other and visit about once a year. Once he told me that the bouncing ride down the hill on the tractor with me steering the tractor with one hand and holding onto him with the other was the scarcest part of the accident.

Charles Cunningham 10-27-2016 Rev 1

The Skill of Driving Backwards

(A Preacher’s Son Meeting Expectations)

Growing up as a teenage boy in the 1950’s in a small southern town, ”Fayetteville, TN”,  was not easy; no one had any money; we were all poor and just didn’t know we were poor. Some very few of us boys and fewer girls had jobs after school and on Saturdays. Most of the kids were from the farm and worked on the farm.  In high school we still got four weeks vacation in the fall for “cotton picking”; however, by 1960 that vacation had ended as machines did that job. There were less than 100 students in my class and that was for the entire county as some consolidation had already begun. Sundays were always for just going to the Drug Store, Sunday school, and church afterwards. During my junior year, I turned 16 and was allowed to get my driver’s license even though only a few, maybe five, of my classmates had their own car. The rest of us had to borrow our parent’s car on weekend nights if we had dates or just wanted to cruise around.

My best friend, Joe Lynn Looper, worked at Raymond Myers Grocery Store on the town square, long gone now after Wal Mart came to town. I worked at a Bob’s Radio and TV Repair Shop; I don’t think one of those shops exist today even in the big cities. We both made about the same amount of money, $4.00 for working all day Saturday, and $2.00 in the afternoon during the week which required leaving school before the last class period, 2:00 pm.

Joe Lynn and I were close because we both worked and only had Friday and Saturday nights off and went to the same church.  Joe Lynn’s father was the minister of the church, Cumberland Presbyterian, kind of a regional denomination at the time; not many around today.  His father was the factual type, heavy plastic thick glasses, always studying for his next sermon or for a revival.  Joe Lynn was the typical preacher’s son; always pushing the boundaries. He got me in trouble more than once as I was more the quiet type and went along with the mischief.

Joe Lynn’s father would allow us to use his older car, a “blue 1951 Hudson Hornet” on the weekends in the late evening and at night provided we would pay him 4 cents a mile for the miles we drove. Gasoline was about 24 cents per gallon at the time, not much.  At first, we limited our travel around town even though that wasn’t much to pay for the car use except we were only earning about 35 cent per hour working.

I had always been a mechanical type kid working on farm tractors, lawn mowers, car engines, and general car work. At the TV repair shop where I worked, we repaired almost everything including old mantle clocks when the TV and radio repair work was slow.  I had also worked on speedometers for cars and repaired them; they worked off a gear system that attached to the tail shaft of the transmission with a rotating cable that went to the dashboard. I also knew that odometers on the speedometer worked both ways; forward would register miles up and reverse would run the odometer backwards.  

Soon after borrowing or renting Joe Lynn’s father’s 1951 blue Hudson Hornet, I told Joe Lynn how a speedometer worked and he immediately tried the idea of driving backwards to see what happened. As predicted, the miles rolled backwards.

That is when we developed the skill of backing a car.  We started backing the car almost everywhere we went and before returning the car to his home we would drive it forward for a short distance.  We always had to drive about ten miles in the forward direction to assure there was mileage registered and to reset the toggle system on the little roller dials on the odometer that registered the miles driven.

Our favorite spots to go were the three pool halls on the town square, the three drive- in restaurants near the river, the recreational center, and the drive- in movie out highway 64.  We kind of always drove on the back streets in the backward direction and eventually got real good at the skill.  We probably drove the car about 25 miles each time we took it out.

During our senior year in high school, Joe Lynn’s father, Brother Looper, was transferred to Nashville and to my knowledge, Brother Looper was never aware of our trickery of car backing.

With limited work on the farm for a farmer, only tobacco was a cash crop and it was always a very small patch, ½ acre or less, and that could be tended in a short period of time each day, a few beef cows, and maybe some pigs to tend.  As a result of having little work to do, the farmer guys had a lot of extra time without any money to spend so that was the reason for the big crowds at the pool rooms.  The only days the farmers were not at the pool room was on the few days per month when there were livestock sales at the stockyards. At the stockyard they could get day work handling the livestock during the auction sales.

The only thing going for other grownups other than professionals was to work in garment plants and shoe plants that had moved from the northern states to the south in the late 1940s because of cheap wages in the south. The trouble with these jobs was the fact that they mostly used women as workers. Very few men worked in these plants as they were only used in the cutting rooms and did the plant and equipment maintenance.

I can remember that at all the pool rooms, the bar keep, actually the cook as few people had enough money to buy beer, would ring a cow bell about 4:00 pm; that was the signal to “End the games and go get her” at the garment plant or shirt plant or shoe plant.

Unfortunately today there are no pool rooms as they have turned into restaurants and almost no jobs except for some type of government job such as working in the court house, police, 911, teaching, city maintenance, utility departments, that sort of thing.  All the garment plants moved to Florida in the mid 1970’s for a short time and then off shore.  Today, in my hometown the employment rate is low because no one was working to start with.

They don’t even have “GO GET HERS” anymore, just government jobs and government grants to provide a few jobs.  Also, I failed to mention that my home town missed the interstate by 18 miles; kiss of death for a small town.

end

where 

scared stillness,

is a good place to rest