Never tell me there's no Santa. I know better cause my Dad was Santa. He, & Mrs. Claus of course, saw to it that I would have so many memorable Christmases that recounting them would be difficult to keep in chronological order .... but I'll try.
My first real memorable Christmas comes to mind because of the Big Santa present. It was blue & white and had training wheels, Ray got a Big Boy version that was blue & white also. It was a rainy Christmas day so we had to ride them under Grandads carport, not a very long ride. I was four. Much latter I learned that Dad er uh Santa had taken the bikes to the hanger on base & refurbished them so they'd be alike (I also think there might have been a blue & white tricycle for Rob but that just might be me rounding out a perfect story). Still can't figure out how they got from Jacksonville FL to Clanton AL. We were traveling in a '51 or so 2 door Chevy at the time 4 kids 6, 4, 3 and 2.
That year we also got these wooden Bull Dogs that you could change the face on you'd lift the back where the ear, nose & mouth changes were kept.
The next one is one Unc has already written of. Fanner Fifties! These were THE BIG items of that year. There was no better brag that year when asked at school after Christmas Break "Wadya Get?!" a Fanner Fifty! It shot real bullets! There were stick on caps for each bullet not a roll. And only one rule that I remember ... "Don't shoot Grandad!" I think this was the year Ray got a printing press & I got a typewriter and we started a News Paper. One issue, maybe 15 words. The typewriter was a bit of a pain & the press & pressman were having issues. Grandad smiled & thought it was great and that was all that mattered to us.
There were always two Christmases. Paw Paws Christmas was always on Christmas Eve. Aunt Eve, Uncle Cliff Betty, Larry & later David always came. Aunt Katty Pat (Kathryn) Uncle Charley, Ann, Carol, Christina and later Cynthia (Cindy) came when they were stationed near (Uncle Charley was AirForce). After a MEGA Meal we got to open all the presents that were from that side of the family. Then we'd go outside & shoot off fireworks! How cool was that? Almost all of Clanton would be out shooting off fireworks. It was as big as the forth of July!
Then off to Mamo & Grandads. More partying! Uncle Bobby & Aunt Nell, Terry, Ben, Mark & later Tim. Aunt Carolyn, Uncle Jimmy and later Jay & Jeff.
To bed to wake early the next morning to the Magic that Mom & Dad er uh Santa & Mrs. Claus worked.
It's late & I gotta do more framing in sub freezing temps in the morning so I'm just gunna post this un finished. I'll get back to it as time allows.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Sunday, December 05, 2010
Memories of Christmas
It’s Sunday morning and I decided to treat myself to a Jimmy Dean sausage patty and scrambled eggs. As the sausage started to cook I was looking down into our living room at our Christmas tree and was suddenly awash in memories.
That smell wafting through the room took me to my Maw Maw’s in the Mill Village. She’d wake at 4:30, had most of her life to go to work in the Mill, and start cooking breakfast. First thing on was coffee, remember the old percolators with the glass on top? Next were the butter milk biscuits, flour, buttermilk & lard hand kneaded into the melt in your mouth miracle that to this day I can’t equal. Then the sausage, a giant iron skillet packed with fat patties sizzling away, filling that little house with a ‘Come and Get it’ smell that you just couldn't’t sleep through. A dozen or so eggs scrambled and Saw Mill gravy to top it all! Yeow! Took a good hour to eat it all.
Then Paw Paw would get out a clean plate and mix up Paw Paw’s Special Butter. Fresh churned butter that, using a fork, he blended with Ribbon Cane syrup to put on that last flaky biscuit you knew you could squeeze in.
Now days the eggs are bad for my cholesterol so’s the sausage and the lard in the biscuits Oh My! Even though there were no preservatives in the sausage, the eggs were what they now call ‘Free Range’ and the lard hadn’t been hydrogenated.
So I shouldn’t have eaten today's eggs or the sausage & I rarely do but it was worth that trip to the Mill Village, listening to Maw Maw softly singing her favorite hymns while she cooked for her family.
Then there were the lights. There were quite a few in the village that participated in the Christmas Light Race but most of ‘em were just trying to keep up with my Paw Paw. Why before he was allowed to turn them on he had to give the power company a 30 minute warning so they could open another gate at Lay Dam. The race was called off by God, on December 20th 1957. A tornado ripped the roofs off of a great deal of the Mill Village, every one off Paw Paws lights along with the trees they were on, and dropped them east of 31 around the old Dan River warehouse.
That smell wafting through the room took me to my Maw Maw’s in the Mill Village. She’d wake at 4:30, had most of her life to go to work in the Mill, and start cooking breakfast. First thing on was coffee, remember the old percolators with the glass on top? Next were the butter milk biscuits, flour, buttermilk & lard hand kneaded into the melt in your mouth miracle that to this day I can’t equal. Then the sausage, a giant iron skillet packed with fat patties sizzling away, filling that little house with a ‘Come and Get it’ smell that you just couldn't’t sleep through. A dozen or so eggs scrambled and Saw Mill gravy to top it all! Yeow! Took a good hour to eat it all.
Then Paw Paw would get out a clean plate and mix up Paw Paw’s Special Butter. Fresh churned butter that, using a fork, he blended with Ribbon Cane syrup to put on that last flaky biscuit you knew you could squeeze in.
Now days the eggs are bad for my cholesterol so’s the sausage and the lard in the biscuits Oh My! Even though there were no preservatives in the sausage, the eggs were what they now call ‘Free Range’ and the lard hadn’t been hydrogenated.
So I shouldn’t have eaten today's eggs or the sausage & I rarely do but it was worth that trip to the Mill Village, listening to Maw Maw softly singing her favorite hymns while she cooked for her family.
Then there were the lights. There were quite a few in the village that participated in the Christmas Light Race but most of ‘em were just trying to keep up with my Paw Paw. Why before he was allowed to turn them on he had to give the power company a 30 minute warning so they could open another gate at Lay Dam. The race was called off by God, on December 20th 1957. A tornado ripped the roofs off of a great deal of the Mill Village, every one off Paw Paws lights along with the trees they were on, and dropped them east of 31 around the old Dan River warehouse.
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
All They Ever Had
I’ve been reading ‘All They Ever Had’ by Rick Bragg. It’s about Mill life in Northeastern Alabama. His descriptions of the working conditions in the Mill and the people doing the work there are dead on. I know because my people on my fathers side were Mill people and for a year I worked in the Dan River Mill in Clanton.
My great grandfather, Porter King West, lost his right hand in the Mill so did his oldest son my great uncle Raymond. Granpa lost his right hand and Raymond lost his left. One of my first memories is at age three walking up the steps to grandpas house with them sitting on the porch hook to hook. As we, my siblings & cousins, got to the top of the stairs they raised their hooks together and shook them at us. Our squeals and screams set the Aunts on them and as they tried to amend the hook looked as menacing with sweet words as it did with ARGH! I do remember giving into that old mans entreaties and sitting in his lap. I even got up the courage to touch the hook. Latter, after his death, I would cry sometimes thinking how horrible that must have been for him.
My grandfather and grandmother, Maw Maw & Paw Paw, lived in the Mill Village, one house away from the road that ran across the front of the Mill. The front of the Mill was all glass with huge tilt sections that were open most months of the year. The glass was blue & blue green and always was beauty & magic to me. The noise that came from the Mill was not the sound of metal on metal but of the constant unsynchronized movements of the looms, like the roar of a waterfall. Maw Maw was a weaver, a weaver was responsible for keeping several looms running, filling the quill feeder, restarting the loom when it tripped, retying the thread when it broke. Paw Paw was a mechanic, mechanics had to keep the looms working, replacing burnt bearings, worn drive belts.
Paw Paw was proud that his son didn’t ‘go into’ the Mill. My Dad joined the Navy to escape that life. Paw Paw warned me “Get an education boy! Never ‘go into’ the Mill.”
Well after a disastrous first year at Montevallo I needed a job and went ‘into’ the Mill. It was only temporary I told them just until I could get back to school.
OMG! 19 and scared to death. That waterfall roar that had fascinated me as a child now became not just a deafening cacophony but a brutal vibration that came through the floor up my legs meeting the noise in my head somewhere near my heart. It was 93 degrees outside with 90 percent humidity, they were misting water into the air to keep the threads from breaking and the looms were creating their own atmospheric hell.
I didn’t run or cry, although I wanted badly to do both. One reason being I needed the job the other was these people were family, they’d worked beside Maw Maw & Paw Paw.
So I became an oiler. One of the easiest jobs on the floor. They gave Alton, the current oiler one week to train me then moved him to Doffing. Alton had wanted to be a Doffer for years, it paid more, and did his best to see that I knew all of the responsibilities of the job. There were seventeen little oil trays on each loom that I had to wipe the accumulated oil soaked lint from and refill with oil. I had four days to do this to every loom in the mill. I can’t remember today how many looms there were but it took every minute of every day of all four days to get it done. The looms were set back to back in rows with just enough room for the doffer to remove the cloth, the mechanics to make repairs and me to oil the Loom. As I stuck my hand into this Slamming Banging machine to wipe the lint from the tray I kept seeing my great grandpas hook. On the fifth day I had to grease the bearings on one third of the looms on the floor. I had to stop the Loom. To stop the Loom you had to time the action so the shuttle, that was flying back and forth at about one hundred passes a minute, was in the left hand or restarting was a real chore. An improper shut down could send the shuttle flying across the room destroying anything in its path, warp, window, or human. Just a quick description. The shuttle was made from hardwood about fourteen inches long four inches wide and about that tall. It was pointed at both ends with metal tips and hollowed out like an old dugout canoe to accept the quill.
So 5 days after starting I’ve learned to work in Dante’s Inferno while breathing cotton lint in one hundred and 10 percent humidity and see to the lubricating needs of a factory’s worth of Looms. Or so I thought. On Monday of my fourth week while standing in the bathroom smoking a cigarette and trying to listen to sage advice from Alton we heard loud banging noises. Now if you can hear a noise louder than the Looms running something BIG is happening. We looked out to see the first nine Looms on the far row stopped and smoking. The floor manager was quick enough to shut off the main power and saved the rest. Seems that ‘Earl & Zena’s boy’ had missed a major grease fitting on all of the Looms.
Found out latter, after I was ‘out of the Mill’, that they didn’t fire me for the same reason they’d given me the easiest job on the floor, I was ‘Earl & Zena’s boy’. So on Tuesday Alton returned to oiler and I was moved to the graveyard shift running quills to the Weavers.
After returning to school I kept a part time job at the Mill. On Sundays the Mill was closed at 6 AM and I went in to ‘Blow down the Mill’. After a week of running with the misters going and the lint flying it got real dang fuzzy in there. Using compressed air I had to blow all of the lint down from the ceiling, off of the drive shafts and pulleys and the Looms then sweep it up. After working in the violence of that big room being there alone with only the noise of escaping compressed air was spooky. Like there was violence in the floor and air still looking for a victim. I think by mid February I gave the job up, getting to Clanton by 6 AM every Sunday after partying on Saturday night wasn’t working.
I never went ‘back in’, I never gave it much thought until I read ‘All They Ever Had’. If you want to know what a large portion of Alabama’s labor force went through in the first three quarters of the 20th Century get a copy.
I didn’t learn the harder lesson that the Mill should have taught, get an education, but I learned a lot about the people in that Mill and what they went through to ‘just get by’. I also learned that they not only tolerated me and cared about me because I was ‘Earl & Zena’s boy” but because I was ‘in the Mill’ just like they were. No better, no worse. proud to be working.
My great grandfather, Porter King West, lost his right hand in the Mill so did his oldest son my great uncle Raymond. Granpa lost his right hand and Raymond lost his left. One of my first memories is at age three walking up the steps to grandpas house with them sitting on the porch hook to hook. As we, my siblings & cousins, got to the top of the stairs they raised their hooks together and shook them at us. Our squeals and screams set the Aunts on them and as they tried to amend the hook looked as menacing with sweet words as it did with ARGH! I do remember giving into that old mans entreaties and sitting in his lap. I even got up the courage to touch the hook. Latter, after his death, I would cry sometimes thinking how horrible that must have been for him.
My grandfather and grandmother, Maw Maw & Paw Paw, lived in the Mill Village, one house away from the road that ran across the front of the Mill. The front of the Mill was all glass with huge tilt sections that were open most months of the year. The glass was blue & blue green and always was beauty & magic to me. The noise that came from the Mill was not the sound of metal on metal but of the constant unsynchronized movements of the looms, like the roar of a waterfall. Maw Maw was a weaver, a weaver was responsible for keeping several looms running, filling the quill feeder, restarting the loom when it tripped, retying the thread when it broke. Paw Paw was a mechanic, mechanics had to keep the looms working, replacing burnt bearings, worn drive belts.
Paw Paw was proud that his son didn’t ‘go into’ the Mill. My Dad joined the Navy to escape that life. Paw Paw warned me “Get an education boy! Never ‘go into’ the Mill.”
Well after a disastrous first year at Montevallo I needed a job and went ‘into’ the Mill. It was only temporary I told them just until I could get back to school.
OMG! 19 and scared to death. That waterfall roar that had fascinated me as a child now became not just a deafening cacophony but a brutal vibration that came through the floor up my legs meeting the noise in my head somewhere near my heart. It was 93 degrees outside with 90 percent humidity, they were misting water into the air to keep the threads from breaking and the looms were creating their own atmospheric hell.
I didn’t run or cry, although I wanted badly to do both. One reason being I needed the job the other was these people were family, they’d worked beside Maw Maw & Paw Paw.
So I became an oiler. One of the easiest jobs on the floor. They gave Alton, the current oiler one week to train me then moved him to Doffing. Alton had wanted to be a Doffer for years, it paid more, and did his best to see that I knew all of the responsibilities of the job. There were seventeen little oil trays on each loom that I had to wipe the accumulated oil soaked lint from and refill with oil. I had four days to do this to every loom in the mill. I can’t remember today how many looms there were but it took every minute of every day of all four days to get it done. The looms were set back to back in rows with just enough room for the doffer to remove the cloth, the mechanics to make repairs and me to oil the Loom. As I stuck my hand into this Slamming Banging machine to wipe the lint from the tray I kept seeing my great grandpas hook. On the fifth day I had to grease the bearings on one third of the looms on the floor. I had to stop the Loom. To stop the Loom you had to time the action so the shuttle, that was flying back and forth at about one hundred passes a minute, was in the left hand or restarting was a real chore. An improper shut down could send the shuttle flying across the room destroying anything in its path, warp, window, or human. Just a quick description. The shuttle was made from hardwood about fourteen inches long four inches wide and about that tall. It was pointed at both ends with metal tips and hollowed out like an old dugout canoe to accept the quill.
So 5 days after starting I’ve learned to work in Dante’s Inferno while breathing cotton lint in one hundred and 10 percent humidity and see to the lubricating needs of a factory’s worth of Looms. Or so I thought. On Monday of my fourth week while standing in the bathroom smoking a cigarette and trying to listen to sage advice from Alton we heard loud banging noises. Now if you can hear a noise louder than the Looms running something BIG is happening. We looked out to see the first nine Looms on the far row stopped and smoking. The floor manager was quick enough to shut off the main power and saved the rest. Seems that ‘Earl & Zena’s boy’ had missed a major grease fitting on all of the Looms.
Found out latter, after I was ‘out of the Mill’, that they didn’t fire me for the same reason they’d given me the easiest job on the floor, I was ‘Earl & Zena’s boy’. So on Tuesday Alton returned to oiler and I was moved to the graveyard shift running quills to the Weavers.
After returning to school I kept a part time job at the Mill. On Sundays the Mill was closed at 6 AM and I went in to ‘Blow down the Mill’. After a week of running with the misters going and the lint flying it got real dang fuzzy in there. Using compressed air I had to blow all of the lint down from the ceiling, off of the drive shafts and pulleys and the Looms then sweep it up. After working in the violence of that big room being there alone with only the noise of escaping compressed air was spooky. Like there was violence in the floor and air still looking for a victim. I think by mid February I gave the job up, getting to Clanton by 6 AM every Sunday after partying on Saturday night wasn’t working.
I never went ‘back in’, I never gave it much thought until I read ‘All They Ever Had’. If you want to know what a large portion of Alabama’s labor force went through in the first three quarters of the 20th Century get a copy.
I didn’t learn the harder lesson that the Mill should have taught, get an education, but I learned a lot about the people in that Mill and what they went through to ‘just get by’. I also learned that they not only tolerated me and cared about me because I was ‘Earl & Zena’s boy” but because I was ‘in the Mill’ just like they were. No better, no worse. proud to be working.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
