AJ Fencl

My name is Albert Joseph Fencl.

I go by AJ though.

I was born on May the 2nd, 1937.

I was born on the head of Cedar Creek, Wayne County.

The road just about ended at Dad's farm there, and the divide was where Cascade Lookout Tire is, the edge of Dad's farm.

One side went to Caster River, one side that Dad lived on went to San Francis.

So he was right on the divide.

But that's where I was born, and I was there until I was 18 years old, almost 19, whenever the wife and I got married.

I started school at Burlington Grade School, which is no longer there, and it was just a little country school.

It was Wanda Stevens Leach was my first teacher, and I was going to grow up and marry that gal, but Bud beat me to her.

Then I was the only student there for a couple of years, and then the Bridges kids moved in.

There was about, I guess, three or four of us there at that school.

Folks decided I needed to be in a school where there was more kids.

So that school was a mile from the house.

I went on down to Coldwater and had the 6th, 7th, and 8th grades in Coldwater.

The roads back in those days were not gravel roads.

They were dirt roads.

So when it got muddy, you had mud hanging on your shoes when you walked.

As I got to 6th grade, I managed to buy a used bicycle.

When the roads were dry enough, I'd ride that.

When it was not dry enough, I would either ride one of Dad's mules.

It was five miles to that Coldwater school.

I'd either ride a mule or I'd run.

Some neighbor boys that lived about two miles from the school, we got to where we could run the full distance from the school to where they went to their house, and then I'd run on all the way home.

You said when you first started school, you were the only student in your class?

Only student, period.

Yes, the only student in the school.

That sounds like a private tutor.

Just about.

The first year I had Wanda Stevens, Wanda Leach.

The second year I was the only student.

The teacher, well, not much of a teacher.

Wanda inspired you to learn.

The next teacher could care less.

Wanda had me doing third grade work the first year.

I was kind of like Dad.

I had a photographic memory.

I could look at a page and read it.

I could sit there and go back to it word for word.

That second teacher I had said you're memorizing.

I'm going to break you of that.

Well, she did.

My memory is not worth squat today because she just turned me against.

But Dad could read a page, look away from you and quote the page word for word.

Did you have any favorite topics in school?

I liked vocational lag.

When electricity came through in 48, we tried to get somebody to wire the house while everybody that was an electrician around was busy.

So one of the neighbors was an electrician.

He said, you can do it.

He said, you can do it.

I said, well, tell me how.

Well, back then it was a 60 amp box and you had to have one plug in in each room and one light in each room.

So I did it.

I wired the house.

Did he help you or?

No, he come by after I did it and check to make sure everything was right.

He said, it's fine.

He said, they can hook it up.

You were just a kid at that time.

You were pretty young. 11 years old.

So you really, it sounds to me like you had your schooling and you did well in that.

But as much as you learned in school, you were really learning from real life things.

Oh yeah.

Hands on.

Hands on.

Yeah.

Well, I had to.

Dad, mechanically dad was, you know, and did you help out neighbors?

Oh yeah.

I helped my brother.

Well, I helped him till he died.

He was a farmer after the war.

He came back married.

He was, uh, over the buses here at Fredericktown from 45 to 47, I get an old 48.

He was over the buses here at town and uh, that over there where the burnt the school, I was just a kid.

He'd take me with him and mow that over there in the summertime cause he had year round job with the school and he'd take me with him when he'd mow that hillside before they ever built that school.

That's quite a hill.

Yes it is.

Uh, you talked about the bridges kids.

Yeah.

It was nine of mills and Arville bridges.

Sure.

Nine of mills and Arville bridges.

Arville was a math teacher at Piedmont.

His son is now a preacher over at, uh, Beulah.

You talked about the cream once a week.

Yeah.

How did you keep it cool so it didn't spill?

Seller.

We didn't have electricity.

We had a kerosene refrigerator, but you couldn't put a five gallon can in a refrigerator.

And we did not have a pump on the well.

Dad usually had about 40 head of hogs.

And in the summertime I had to draw water for those hogs with a bucket.

The well was 24 foot to the water and uh, we would draw it with a windlass and a rope and we'd fill barrels, 55 gallon barrels, set them on the back of that old truck, haul them to where the hogs were and water the hogs with them.

He usually run about 20, 25 head of cows.

Same thing.

You watered the cows.

They'd come in every evening for water.

Would that be, uh, how many hours a day would you say?

It probably took me an hour, hour and a half to draw the water.

Both in the morning and the evening or just?

Just once a day.

But uh, the well, you didn't have to worry about the well.

You couldn't draw it down.

It had 24 foot of water in it.

It was 54 foot well and it helped the dad and my uncle decide to drain it one time and clean it.

And they took four buckets, one on each end of the rope and they drew all day long.

They had it down three inches that evening.

I was going to ask if the level dropped in the summer.

No.

And that was for the whole house?

You did that for the animals and for you?

Oh yeah.

Yeah, we only had the one well and the neighbors when their well would go dry in the hot summertime, they'd come and get water.

Um, so you said you kept it in a cellar.

Yeah.

How does a cellar compare to a, did some neighbors have?

Oh yes.

Uh, the bridges down there, they had spring water, but we had the cellar.

You'd carry water up and dad had a trough dug in the ground and it was a trough probably about that deep, probably the size of this table.

And you fill that with water.

And then of course it being dirt, you had to fill it about once a day because it would seep out.

So you always filled it, filled it in the morning and you carried the water to that.

Yeah.

And dad had built the cellar back into a hillside and it was rock and that's where he kept the potatoes and kept the fruit.

I'd say that that whenever we sold the place in 58, I'd say there was probably enough fruit and stuff in that cellar to get two or three families for a year.

So, so you put the water in the cellar that kind of just kept it cool.

Yeah.

It kept it cool because the water out of that well was cold.

It was so deep in the ground, it was cold.

And so just over the course of the day, it would seep out.

It seeped out.

The ground was still wet, so it would keep the, the cream cool, but the cream did sour.

Of course it didn't spoil, but it was, it was sour cream.

Right.

So you had sour cream.

You had sour cream and the more sour it was, the better it would test and the more it would bring.

Really?

Really.

Yeah, really.

Oh, when we, we'd cool a watermelon for the 4th of July, we'd put it in a bucket and let it down in the well in the water.

And that's how we cooled a watermelon for.

Of course.

If you had ice, you had to buy it and the ice didn't last very long in the summertime.

But where was this place?

Where was it in relation to like Mark 1?

Well, Wayne County line, just the other side of the Wayne County line is Cedar Creek and you made a left turn and went up the creek as far as you could go.

And that is where dad was.

If you topped out the ridge there, they're what they call crossroad hill.

One road went to Mark 1.

One went to upper Bear Creek.

One came back down and came out on top of the clogged gold hill down there above the bridges.

It came out down there.

I think it's a forestry road through there now.

Just follows that ridge all the way through.

But whenever dad hacked tile, I know what I started to tell.

I remember as a kid and I must have been pretty little because all I can remember about is picking up juggles and carrying them and piling them by the wagon where dad had hacked ties.

He'd hacked ties to pay the taxes.

He sold a trailer, a truck load of cattle, got the check back.

He told mom, he said, well, there's not enough to pay the taxes.

And I was just a little bitty thing, like I said, and he hacked ties and the juggles that were he hacked the ties, we of course burnt them in the stove and I would pick up those and carry them over to the wagon.

Wasn't big enough to throw them in, but I was big enough to carry those juggles.

They'd be about like that.

I don't know if you know how to attack ties or hacked or not, but you take a like a railroad tie.

It is a railroad tie when you get done.

And what part is the juggle?

That's the part that comes off of the sides of the log.

You take an axe and you take that axe and you make notches into one side of that all the way down it.

And then you come back with a broad axe and you knock those where you've cut in, you knock those off and smooth it up with a broad axe.

To square it?

Square it up.

And you do that on all four sides.

The juggles were what you'd chopped off.

Yeah, that and Dad taught me how to make shingles also when I was a kid.

You know what a shingle is?

Wooden shingle.

Okay, he taught me how to do that.

As a matter of fact, my daughter has dad's fro.

I gave her dad's fro.

I try to give the kids and tell them a little bit about it while I'm still alive.

Two girls, Louann Moyers and then Sherry Hiller over here.

Louann married Roger Moyers, Bud Moyers' son, and then Sherry married a guy out of Illinois.

Now a fro, you're drawing toward it or something?

No, that's a drawing knife.

Oh, well how do you use a fro then?

I guess I'm confused.

I thought there's something where you're pulling it toward you.

That's a drawing knife.

Any access?

A spoke shave is similar to that, but it's much smaller.

And it's what they use to shave to shape wagon wheel spokes.

But a fro is a long, flat, you got something over there I can show you.

A fro is like that.

This is a blade, a handle up like this.

And this is a hole here in the end of that blade.

It's like a knife blade.

Then you hit this up here with a wooden mallet and that drives it down through the block of wood.

And that's how you split a shingle.

So kind of perpendicular, L-shaped, but at the center.

It's a bar this way and then the handle comes up and you hit it here on the handle.

You hit it first here to start it.

And once it's started then you drive it on down with this handle.

You hold the handle and just hit it with that wooden mallet, wood on wood.

Now were these shingles, is that what you used for your buildings?

Ruffing shingles.

Right, were these what you used for your buildings?

Well, let's say it this way.

I could lay in bed and look through the ceiling and see the stars shine because the shingles are lapped like that.

So you could see the, you could look up through like that and see the stars shining.

But you have to do that because in the rainy times.

They swell.

Yeah.

And your roofs are like this.

They're real steep.

Dad used, tried to smoke his meat.

He had a ham under each arm and he started up this shingle roof.

His feet went out from under him.

He turned the hams loose.

He caught by his hand.

He and my uncle were batching.

He caught by his hands and he were hanging there by his hands.

He kicked the ladder down as he slid and he is hollering, brother, brother.

Unc moved kind of slow.

He come around and he said, what do you want, brother?

Dad was laying flat on his back and he said, why are you laying in the yard?

Dad said, because my brother did not set the ladder up for me.

But it was something else.

Dad had trained the dog, these hogs that he ran in the woods.

He trained this dog to where the dog would grab the hog by the ear and jump over its back and pull its head around like that until the hog gave up.

And then dad could drive it wherever he wanted it to.

Was it more tired or dizzy?

I don't know.

It just got to gave up about what it amounted to.

Now this, this was for the spokes of the wagon?

No, that was for roughing shingles.

The spoke shave looked similar to your drawing knife, except it kind of like a plane.

It had a little handle right here in the middle was a blade and the blade was adjustable.

It had a thing on it here and you could put it down however you wanted.

Then on each end, it had a kind of like that a handle.

I'm not that good an artist, but you did that and you smoothed the spoke with it and shaped the spoke with it.

Now your drawing knife, which you were talking about, it had a blade like this and then it had a handle come out both sides kind of like that.

And this part here was sharp and you just pulled it towards you.

Yeah, that looks dangerous.

It is.

Just want to put a piece of wood between you and how to stop it.

Well, you put a block so it only comes so far and then you pull it towards you.

Yeah.

One question I had about your, uh, your, your extended family, your, your uncle, would you have multiple uncles and aunts and they all sort of there in the same area?

No, uncle Frank until uh, 44, uncle Frank and aunt Daisy lived in Chicago and he started out as dad did as a chef and the Drake hotel.

Then he bought a limo and he drove for the drive for the hotel.

He, I've got a picture of his limo sucker, big old long Lincoln and he knew Henry Ford.

He had hauled Henry Ford up to Michigan when he'd go up to his hunting lodge in Michigan and dad left the Drake and come down and rode the train to the end of the railroad track, which was at pond switch just out from cascade and got off and uh, visited the Shondas there.

I don't know to this day if they're Ken or if it was just somebody from the old country that he knew a family from the old country that he knew because dad and his two brothers and one sister came to this country from Bohemia.

Now it's Czech, but they came immigrated from Austria because Bohemia was already going socialist at that time and we were not taking immigrants from a socialist country.

And so dad immigrated from Austria and uncle Anton and aunt Amali, they were married over there and had at least one child before they got out.

And uncle Frank was the baby of the family and aunt Anna had come first and she made enough money to where she loaned them the money for their fare over here.

And dad in Germany at that time, which is very much like it is now, you go to school eight years, then you have two years of training and a job.

Then you go into the military and when you come out of the military, then you go back in as an apprentice to this job that they told you to do.

You don't get to pick your jobs.

They tell you what it's socialism, communism.

You don't have the freedom.

They tell you.

When they came here, dad could speak, please give me and thank you in English.

But there was a bunch of the immigrants and they landed on the East coast, of course, and they told where they wanted to go.

They knew enough to say Chicago and they shipped them to Chicago.

Well, he had relatives in Chicago that met him.

So he went to work at the only job he could get was at the kill floor in the national stockyards, killing the animals.

Of course, he didn't know the language.

So he went to night school and he told me, he said, I would eat, I would have a cup of coffee and a donut for breakfast.

That was my breakfast, a nickel cost a nickel.

Then he didn't tell what he had for lunch.

And he said, then he had supper with his brother and sister-in-law.

He rented from them.

But he said, I had plenty of space at night school.

He said, I had two suits of clothes.

And he said, they hang in the same closet.

He said, I had plenty of room because they hung with the worry work clothes was from that kill floor.

So, but when they came, so they said they were from Austria.

Yeah.

That's how they were allowed.

Right.

So they went to Chicago.

So your uncle stayed up there, worked up there, but your dad ended up coming.

Well, dad came down, he rode the train to the end of the track, stayed with the Shondas.

He had got a throat infection.

He was a chef at the Drake Hotel.

He got this throat infection off the air of the lakes there and they gave him 30 days paid vacation, which was something you didn't hear of back then.

And he came down to visit down here and to clear that throat infection up.

The day before he was to go back, the Shondas went down to cold water to the grist mill to grind cornmeal.

He saw the place.

He said, I like this place.

And grandpa Shonda said, well, it's for sale.

Jim Oliver wants to sell it 40 acres.

Dad bought it telegram back to Chicago and quit his job.

Four years.

He stayed there on the place.

He farmed by the book by the farm book of knowledge.

It took him four years to go broke.

He went back to Chicago and drove a cab for four years.

My uncle Frank came down his baby brother and he was going to take care of the place.

Well, he and he married Aunt Daisy, which was she lived on the next farm down.

He married her and they stayed there for four years.

Then they went back to the city and was there till June.

He was killed in Germany in the second world war.

His son was killed within 40 kilometers of where they came from.

He was a mechanic in an on the airplane and one of the engines quit.

He and his buddy went out to see what was wrong with the engine.

They were electrocuted in the plane, burnt to a crisp.

And then that's when Aunt and Aunt Daisy moved to Valley station down here.

And they lived at Valley station till the highway was ready to leave.

And then they moved down to cold water.

But he come back after four years and they went to Chicago.

Yeah.

He came back in four years.

He went broke.

Then he went back to Chicago and made enough in Chicago to in four years to come back to start farming by common sense.

He would go to the woods.

The old ground was so poor, it wouldn't grow millet.

He'd go to the woods and he'd get rotten logs and stuff, haul them and dump them on the ground and plow them under.

And he'd plow under green manure crops.

He put the barnyard manure on.

Before St.

Genevieve lime ever was, Dad would carry, or not carry, but haul limestones from the creek.

There was an old cellar in this one farm that he had.

He filled that old cellar full of logs and stumps, anything he could get in there.

Filled it full of that pile of these limestone on top of that and burnt the limestones.

And he had white lime.

And he spread this white lime on the farm.

He did it all manually.

But whenever he died, before he died, he was raising 100 bush of corn to the acre on that old creek bottom farm.

Crop rotation.

And he said, you do what the Bible tells you.

He said, every seventh year you let that field rest.

He said, you put crop on it and you just let it rest.

You don't harvest it.

He said, you turn it under.

The next year, he said, you do that with another field.

And he said, that's the way.

He said, the Bible tells you how to farm.

And he was right, because like I said, it wouldn't grow hardly weeds.

And he was growing 100 bush of corn to the acre.

And back then, you didn't plant corn like they do today.

You didn't put the stalks this close together.

He checkrode.

Over 42 inches, you had two stalks of corn.

And you plowed it this way and you plowed it that way.

Back then, the times were hard, of course. 42 was when the war really started.

So this was in the middle of the war.

And I can remember when I was a kid, just a little shaver, I had no idea what a poll tax meant.

But dad would take me along and he'd work out his poll tax.

That's the way you didn't have county road tax.

You worked it out.

So many days with a team or lie about twice that much if you worked it without a team.

And dad would have a slip.

The road went down the creek bottom for a bigger part of the way, and then it would come out.

There was just two ruts.

If you met a car, you had to pull off wherever you could and meet them.

It was just a wagon trail about what it amounted to.

Dad would use that slip and the team to fill in holes where the creek had washed out holes where you couldn't get passable.

Then after I got out of grade school, well, before I got out of grade school, one of the events that I'll never forget, a helicopter went over, liked to scare the living daylights out of me.

What in the world was this silly looking thing with egg beaters on top of it?

But that was sometime during the first part of the war, whenever that went over.

And we were so far up there in the holler, it was a holler that we lived in.

It was so far up the holler that you had the only way you could go on past the house was with team and wagon.

And if a car come up the road, you knew it was coming to us because it couldn't go any further.

My first Volkswagen that I ever saw came up that road and I thought somebody had put a washing machine motor on something or other with that putt putt coming at us.

Generally, dad had a car from my first recollections, but during the war, you couldn't buy tires.

It was hard to get tires, hard to get gasoline because you had to have stamps.

So dad only used the car rarely.

We'd go to church about once a month and he'd use the car when we'd go to church because it was the closest one was probably about eight or 10 miles.

And then where my mother came from over at Club, Missouri, it was probably twice that far.

We'd go over and visit my grandmother over there and go to church with her once in a while.

The main thing was once a week, usually on Fridays, dad would gather us up and we'd take the team and wagon and we'd go down to Coldwater, which was five miles.

There was two stores down there and one was a post office.

So you got your mail once a week there at the post office.

They'd go down and visit and that was your local gathering spot there at the post office and all the men would get together and tell what went on and visit and keep up with what was going on in the community.

It was also where your politics and so forth were taught.

I graduated from high school, I graduated from grade school, should I say, and I had a choice.

I could either go to Frederick town or I could go out the other direction and go to Greenville.

Well, I knew some of the kids that were going to Greenville, they were my age and I knew some of them, they were from Cascade.

I opted to go over there and dad at that time had a four wheel drive Jeep and so I could go out this wagon road with that Jeep.

I could go out that and catch the bus over there.

Then they improved it a little bit to where you could get over it with a car if you knew what you were, where you were going and how you were going.

Dad also had an old 33 model ton and a half truck, mechanical brakes.

He used it around there on the farm.

Well, whenever he needed the truck, the Jeep, I got the old ton and a half truck to catch the bus.

Well, my brother was 16 years older than I was and dad was not mechanically inclined.

He could handle a team of mules and do anything with them, but if it was mechanical, forget it, he was lost.

So my brother, he started training me to be a mechanic, to work on machinery and so forth when I was a small child.

He was a perfectionist.

So I rigged this old truck up to where I could drive it when I had to.

They didn't have a muffler on it and I don't think dad even had license on it.

I drove a well pipe up in it where the muffler was and run it clear to the back end of the bed, which was a 12 foot bed on it.

About a mile from the bus stop, there was a big hill that you had to go down and a creek at the bottom of the hill, no bridges, you afforded the creeks.

Well, whenever I'd start off that hill, I'd throw that old truck up in second gear and that's what slowed me down going down there to where I didn't drown it out when I crossed the creek.

Well, it would backfire all the way down that hill, sound like a cannon going off.

If I was running a little late, the bus driver would stop, open the doors.

He'd say two minutes, he'll be here.

He could hear me coming off that hill and he'd wait for me.

He was also the brother to one of my best friends, but I went to Greenville.

I'll back up a little bit.

We did not have electricity till 48, I believe it was, when we got electricity.

We didn't have a tractor until then.

Dad sold some timber and we managed to buy a Ford tractor.

Boy, I was in heaven then.

I got away from those mules.

Dad couldn't do much with the tractor.

He never could.

As young as I was, I did the plowing and the cultivating and planting and all that with the tractor.

Well, we grew corn and wheat, oats and alfalfa.

It was open rain, so the hogs and the cattle both ran in the woods in the summertime.

In the wintertime, you had your straw stack where you'd thrash your grain because the separator come around and it'd make the rounds and it'd stop at every farm and the farmers would all gather up at that farm and they would thrash the grain and then it would move on to the next.

Everybody would go to that farm and they swapped labor.

Nobody hired labor.

It was all community labor.

My brother, after he'd come back from the Second World War, he ran the separator.

He and another man, he ran the separator.

Another man, a friend of his ran the old W-40 international tractor.

That's what they powered it with.

You could hear that old tractor coming before it ever got there for a couple miles because it would only run about two or three miles an hour.

You'd hear that thing coming and you knew it was getting close.

So these crops that you were growing, was this mostly for...

For our own use.

For your own use, okay.

The only thing Dad sold was eggs and cream.

Mom kept about 100 to 150 chickens and once a week they'd take those eggs off.

Well, we milked several cows.

They were not milked off.

They were just cows.

We'd separate that.

They had a McCarmick-Dearing separator and you separated the cream from the milk and then once a week they would take that cream down and ship it.

The mail carrier would pick it up at Coldwater, take it to Piedmont and he would catch the train at Piedmont.

Sunset Valley Creamery.

I'm trying to think where that was at.

That's where it went though.

And of course made cheese and butter out of it.

Didn't bring much.

The eggs were cheap.

Your cream was cheap, but so was the commodities you had to buy.

Pretty well, the only thing that we bought was sugar.

Dad had to have his coffee.

So you bought big jars of Manhattan coffee.

They'd buy that.

Then during the war, when you couldn't get sugar, they used Karo syrup to sweeten the stuff.

And we, Dad had his own bees, so we had honey.

We always had a big garden.

We always shared mom canned and canned and canned and we shared everything with some of the relatives, mom's sister and her husband that was in the city because a lot of stuff they couldn't grow, of course being in the city.

He worked at Granite City Steel in Granite City and he'd come down about once a month and they'd load the car up with canned stuff and take it back with them.

We always had plenty to eat.

We was poor.

We didn't know it.

Dad killed four hogs in the spring, four hogs in the fall.

To this day, I do will not like squirrel.

One summer we ran out of meat.

Son, take the 22 and go bring us two squirrels for supper and two for breakfast.

We had fried squirrel.

We had boiled squirrel.

We had roasted squirrel.

We had squirrel any way you could think of it.

Squirrel and dumplings.

You also had a quota.

You had to bring a squirrel for every 22 shell that you shot because those 22 shells, 50 of those, they costed 25 cents.

So you didn't waste any ammunition.

I got pretty good at it.

I got in trouble once because I brought a squirrel home and I'd use three shots to kill it.

Mom said, what's wrong with this squirrel's feet?

I said, well, it was on the other side of the tree and I had to shoot its front feet off to get it to come around the tree where I could kill it.

Dad said, why didn't you go around the tree?

And I said, every time I did, it would.

We didn't eat rabbits because summertime they had wolves in them and you did not eat them.

Had what?

Wolves, worms in their necks.

Yeah, only after a good frost?

You didn't eat them until after a good freeze.

And did you eat them in the winter or no?

Not much, no.

So generally you had your pigs.

We'd run hogs in the woods all the time and he'd put up four.

He'd bring in four out of the woods and put them in a pen.

He'd buy a tankage and feed them corn.

But he'd bring them in and he'd go out and hunt them up and corn them so they'd follow him in.

Did the same with the cattle.

We'd go out and hunt the cattle up.

That was my job once a week after I got big enough to do it, to go out and find the cattle, tow them in and salt them.

How old would that be when you got old enough to do it?

Probably from the time I was about nine, ten years old.

Until I was ten years old, dad said, you're a child.

You enjoy yourself.

You have fun.

But after I got ten years old, then it was time for me to do the farming, do the help with the hay and everything.

I had a question about your brother.

You said your father wasn't mechanical.

No.

How did your brother learn the mechanics that he taught you?

The Graham's mom's brothers were farmers and they were very good with equipment.

My brother was actually my half-brother.

He was 16 years old.

He learned from his uncle, mom's twin brother.

They taught him.

Like I said, he was a perfectionist.

By the time I started high school, I was overhauling Chevrolet motors.

Why?

I could get $35 to overhaul one and the parts only cost seven, so I was really making money.

He went to N.Y.A. National Youth School, my brother did, and became a machinist.

That was another reason he was so good.

He could take anything and make it work.

If he didn't have parts, he could make the part whatever and make it work.

He's the one that trained me and was one of the things that helped Phyllis whenever she started with SMTS because she'd call me and have me diagnose the vehicles.

Then she got to where she knew what they were.

If one had a bearing going out, she'd describe what it sounded like and I'd tell her, well, it's a bearing going out and tell her where it was at and what it was.

Well, after I told her once or twice, she knew it.

We tended the garden.

Of course, we didn't have a teller and we tended the garden with a mule.

That doggone mule was smart.

It could step on every plant you didn't want it to.

I'd usually wind up having to lead the mule while Dad plowed the garden, but he had fruit trees.

He had grape vines making jelly, fruit trees for the fruit.

Pretty well self-sufficient.

After wife and I got married, I'll jump ahead a little ways.

After the wife and I got married, Dad was up in his years because he was 56 whenever I was born.

He was getting up in his years and he said, son, go bring the truck out for me.

It was in the shed, in the car shed.

Well, I started to bring the truck out for him and he was going to open the gate for me.

Brakes were out on the truck.

I took out his pear tree.

He bawled me out for taking out his pear tree.

I said, well, Dad, it was you or the pear tree.

He still didn't like it because I took the pear tree out.

He said, I have babied that thing.

I've grafted it.

And he said, you took it out with the truck.

But I fixed the truck for him.

I fixed the brakes for him and that's soothed him a little bit.

We also, in the summertime, we gathered wild grapes.

Mom made jelly out of those wild grapes.

She had us gather elderberries.

She made elderberry jelly.

Just about anything that was edible.

She'd get different kinds of greens and we'd eat those.

I liked rhubarb.

I liked rhubarb.

It wasn't wild, but that's what I liked.

Rhubarb and huckleberries, blueberries.

We also picked huckleberries and I loved them.

We also picked blackberries.

It was an old place that had been thrown out.

It had been homesteaded and then the people starved out and left and it was cleared, but the blackberries took it over.

We'd go there.

Everybody in the community would go there and pick blackberries.

It was about a mile, mile and a half from our house, but you always got up real early and got there before somebody else picked the best berries.

You mentioned earlier how you all worked together for harvesting and that sort of thing.

Thinking about the community that you were near, can you describe a little bit how close were you to your nearest neighbors?

Are we talking like a little neighborhood or were you scattered?

We were scattered out.

It was farms.

From our house to Coldwater, which was five miles, there was the Huffman Place, the White Place, the Bridges Place, the other Bridges Place.

It was like six farms in the five miles.

An interesting thing, I think, my wife's dad, the farm next to dad came up for sale.

It was an estate sale.

Dad went down to buy it and he'd come home and mom asked him, said, well, did you buy the Huffman Place?

He said, no.

She said, what did it bring?

He said, $3,500.

She said, well, why didn't you buy it?

You said you'd go to 4,000.

He said, we'll have good neighbors.

He said Mr. Whitener bought it.

He said, we'll have good neighbors.

Everett put a family down there on the place, cleaned it up, fenced it and everything.

Well, they had a boy that was two years younger than I am, so he became a good friend of mine.

We would both go to Coldwater to school.

We'd walk together or sometimes he'd ride the handlebars of the bicycle.

Then later on, after they moved off, they moved down to their own house at Coldwater.

Everett run cattle down there.

Well, these mules that dad had, they could jump a woven wire fence with three barbs on top of it and never touch it.

They'd just walk up to it and sail over it.

Well, they liked the grass down there in his field better than they did dad's.

I'd been over helping my brother on Caster River.

We had been combining wheat, I think it was, and just finished up.

It was about the 4th of July and we'd just finished up.

I'd come in because I'd stayed over there with him.

I'd go in and lay down and take a nap.

Well, when my mom or dad wanted to holler at me, we got company.

Well, here come the mules up the road with my wife and her mother and her grandmother in the car chasing them.

She brought the mules home.

I went out the well and drew up a fresh bucket of water.

I had to offer this cute little black-headed gal a good drink of water.

I'd been dating a girl over on Caster River.

She went back to Indiana.

After she went back to Indiana, I decided I'd find out more about this cute little black-headed gal.

Well, I did.

They was having a revival meeting up at 12 Mile Church there.

I and a buddy of mine went up there to that revival meeting.

Well, back a long story short, I asked Retta White, which was Retta Gregory at the time.

She was my sister's friend in high school.

I asked her what that gal's name was really because this buddy of mine that had lived down there on the farm told me it was Phyllis.

I thought that he was wrong.

I thought that the blonde was Phyllis, and she was Janet.

Retta told me.

After church was over, I asked if I could take her for a soda and then take her home.

That mistake was 63 years ago.

Actually, 64 years ago.

Yeah.

But then after we got married, I worked, I enlisted in the Air Force.

Went up four times.

The quota was full because that was back in peacetime.

Jobs were scarce.

I went up four times.

After the fourth time, I said I'd been getting odd jobs around in the community, helping on the farm and so forth.

We'd been living with her folks.

Well, she discovered that she was pregnant.

I went to work at a gas plant there, and I worked at the glass plant for a while.

They changed management, and I got laid off because I was a casual.

We went to the city.

Luanne was born.

We went to the city.

We was up there 18 months.

I come back, started hauling logs for $6 a day.

I was making $3 an hour in the city, but we hated the city.

So we come back.

I went to work doing that.

I worked at that for a while.

Then I went to work at the shoe factory.

Got a job at the shoe factory, and I worked at the shoe factory for nine years.

Then I went to work over at Pallet Knob Pellet, and I worked there for 16 years.

No, 14 years.

I worked there.

Was that a factory?

No, that was mine.

I started in as a laborer underground, and then I was a powder monkey, a driller, heavy equipment operator.

Then I bit up into the lab.

Well, I bit up into the operations first and ran primary and secondary operations in the mill.

Then I bit into the lab.

The last seven years that I worked there, I was in the lab.

What was mine?

Iron ore.

Pellets.

We shipped pellets to Granite City Steel, and they made all kinds of iron out of it.

Sheet iron and granite ware and that kind of stuff.

If I could just ask you, you said you enlisted.

Yeah.

When you tried to enlist, what years would that have been?

I was born in 1937, and I was 18.

So there's your math.

I'm used to a calculator.

55?

Yeah.

So you were enlisting just to?

Have a job.

Okay.

Have a job because jobs were scarce.

Because we were between wars.

Yeah.

At that time.

Yeah.

Yeah, I was 55. 55 is when we got married.

We got married September the 17th of 55.

So it had been the first, it had been probably the month before that that I enlisted.

We didn't intend to get married until I came back home from boot camp.

But every time I'd leave, she'd cry.

So we went ahead and got married.

And you said they had a quota so they wouldn't accept you.

Right.

They'd only take so many because and they had enough already backlogged.

And there were six of us enlisted at the same time.

And out of the six, two of us passed because they were very, very strict on who they would take.

Two of us passed out of the six.

The fourth time the other boy went back, they had the Southwoods Motel down here, his folks did.

And he went the fourth time and he went in.

And he retired out 20 years later.

And I didn't go in, I got married and I haven't retired yet.

Yeah. 63 years and I'm still not retired.

Well, you mentioned working at the shoe factory.

Yes.

Can you talk a little bit about where that was and what?

Brown shoe over here.

Okay.

Now, was that where Ivan's farm place is now?

Yeah.

Okay, because it's, you know, I always knew about the distribution center over on the other side there.

I'm wondering.

That's the new plant.

Yeah, that was like the, yeah.

I worked in the old plant.

I left there in 69.

So what did you do there?

Well, I started in there in what they call the bottoming department, which meant that I, uh, trying to think what all I did there.

I put the soles, tack soles to the last.

And then after they put the, the beating around the outside edge, I would pull the tacks out where I'd put those tacks in before.

Then I bit over into Charlie Smith's department, which was lasting room and I run a heel seat laster.

And that's how I got this thumb here.

I got hooked on a tack and it jerked it into the machine and mashed that thumb.

But I run that heel seat laster till I left and went to the mines.

Went to the mines in 69.

What kind of shoes were they making?

Brown shoes.

Yeah.

But was it, were they boots?

Were they just a variety of kinds?

Variety.

We made, uh, kangaroo skin shoes for the nuns.

We made, uh, loafers, penny loafers.

We made lace-up men's shoes.

Just about any kind of shoe you want to name.

We made it.

Life Stride, Buster Brown.

How big of a building, like how many do you recall?

Like how big was it?

I think a lot of people don't really.

Probably around, I'd say 250, 300 people.

Yeah.

They were still a lot of jobs.

It was two floors.

Yeah.

Well, that's what kept Fredericktown from having TGUSA and some other plants because Brown said, you bring them in, they pay more than we do, we'll leave.

And then they left.

And then they left.

And TGUSA wanted to build here.

What did they make?

TGUSA auto parts for Toyota and General Motors and Ford.

Did it go to Perryville?

It went to Perryville.

Perryville was their second choice.

I was wondering when you worked at Brown Shoe, if, uh, if any of the equipment broke, did they ever ask you to fix it?

Oh yeah.

No, they had, uh, Willis Preacher Guess.

Willis Guess was one of the mechanics there.

And he did about all that.

I just, it was union labor and you did what you were hired to do.

Yeah.

You did what you were hired to do.

I would, uh, on some of the machines, I'd speed them up where they was belt driven.

The drive pulleys got bigger by somehow.

So they ran faster.

Now you had jobs outside.

You worked inside the factory.

You worked in a mine.

I farmed the whole time.

I farmed and run cattle the whole time.

Then, uh, in seven, let's see, what was the centennial year?

76.

Okay.

In 76, I broke my leg.

The bunch of the kids wanted me to go with them, sponsor them from church on a roller skating trip.

Well, come on Uncle Jay.

They all call me Uncle Jay.

Come on Uncle Jay.

You can skate.

I hadn't skated since I was eight or 10 years old.

First round around the rink, kid ran into me and knocked me down and I broke my leg.

39.

Yeah.

You were 39?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I broke my leg.

Spiral break in the ankle.

So I, uh, that was 16 weeks.

I was out of work.

Well, I, I cannot be still.

So a friend of ours, which was a pastor at, at 12 mile church at the time, he said, why don't you sell used cars?

I said, I couldn't sell an old sitting hen.

He said, sure you could.

He said, I'll sell you that whole row on the back row back there.

There's 20 cars.

He said, I'll sell you those 20 cars for a hundred apiece.

I said, okay.

So in a cast, I started moving cars.

We, he helped and we moved 20 cars to the field behind the house.

Well, I'd pull one out at a time and go through it.

Whatever was wrong with it.

I'd fix it, put it in the front yard.

I'd have anywhere from three to five cars in the front yard.

I'd sell one, of course, take another one in on it, fix whatever was wrong with it.

So I got, I had a use, I had a dealership license for several years.

Then I started selling farm machinery and salvaging Alice Chalmers tractors on the side.

I got a broker's license and started selling real estate when the mines shut down.

I got a broker's license in 1980, opened the United Farm Agency in Farmington, then moved it here to Frederictown.

And I got an insurance license and I sold health and life insurance.

And I kept my broker's license until two years ago.

Two years ago, I turned it in.

I said, that's, that's enough.

And I turned it in, but I sold for United Farm.

Then it went to United National, then United Country.

I sold for Century 21 as a broker sales.

And then after Dottie closed the office, I opened the office down there at Bryan's down by Green's Flea Market, had it open down there for a couple of years and decided that was enough.

And so I sent my broker's license in and quit.

And I'd also sent my insurance license in.

And I, at 62, I sold the cattle and rented the farm out where we lived on, rented it out.

I had a couple of other farms rented and I let, let them go.

And I quit, I quit fooling with cattle.

And Leroy Stafford rented the place down there and I let him have it for, mow it, bush hog it twice a year and keep the fences up.

And that's what it amounted to, but that kept the farm from growing up.

I did go back down to my old home place.

I took the great grandkids down there last summer.

The fields where we grew crops, where I had combine grain and pick corn, there's tie-sized timber in now.

They've let it grow, go completely back to timber.

But I've run about every kind of equipment that there was, drills and equipment, heavy equipment, worked at the shoe factory, ran all kinds of equipment there.

The funny thing at the mines, after Pollock Knobs shut down, I went over to AMACS, went to work at AMACS and they hired in 11, no, yeah, 11 of the old Pollock Knobs boys at the same time.

Well, the foreman's over there, they would hire in new hires.

They'd send us with them.

They said, you go with those guys, they know what they're doing.

They've got experience.

So they'd send us to train the kids that they hired.

Of course, we were all in our late 40s by that time.

And so they'd send us with them to train them.

Oh, I also left out one thing too.

After I sent in my broker's license, I decided that I was a truck driver.

So I bought a MAC truck and I started hauling logs because I was home every night.

So I was hauling logs and that's how I got this.

The equalizer valve on the air ride trailer ruptured, took the load of logs down through the woods and I went with it.

I've got 20, 26 bones and this side of my face was crushed.

My eye socket, my eye was down in my sinus cavity.

Eye socket was messed up, had 68, 68 screws, eight bone grass, 14 titanium plates in this side of my face.

So I retired from that too.

My wife made me retire there.

She said no more of that.