GROWING UP IN THE 40'S - Part 4

This is not Charley but similar.

The envy of every kid in Granddaddies neighborhood was my buddy Charley.  Charley had a goat cart.  His brother built the cart using two bicycle wheels and some wood and Charley drove it all over the neighborhood.  Yep, right there inside the Atlanta city limits they had a couple of goats that they milked.  Charley would hook one up and drive it around like a horse and sulky. 

John Tankersley (center)

Farm animals in the city were common back then and my Granddaddy, John Tankersley,  had two chicken houses with a bunch of hens.  He would buy his chicks by the hundred from some place in Texas and have them shipped in on the railroad.  I was able to go down with him to the railroad freight place to pick them up one time.  I was also able to go with him one time to borrow a mule, plow, and wagon to plow his garden and I got to ride back with him on the wagon pulled by the mule.  Yes, right there on Bankhead highway with all the cars zipping by us.  Granddaddy was an old timer with the phone company and he started out driving mule drawn wagons carrying poles and he had plowed with mules as a boy.

You hear kids now say that they are bored.  I don't ever remember being bored or hearing any other kid say they were bored back then.  There was always something that we thought was fun or interesting to do. 


We played with cap guns and if we didn't have any guns or caps we could always point a finger and yell "BANG, BANG, You're dead".  We played "Army" or "Cowboys and Indians"  and I'm sure that either is very politically incorrect.  I don't think any of us grew up to be murderers or terrorists.  We knew that it was play and not serious.  The adults now are the clueless ones about this.

Which is lower on the IQ scale between idiot or moron?  Moron sounds worse.  WE ARE BEING RULED BY MORONS!  Sorry, I digress.


We all had pea shooters that we shot at each other.  There was always a cane patch around to cut the cane and china berries, dogwood berries, or even dried peas made good ammo.  No, nobody ever lost an eye.  How could we cut the cane you may ask.  Well, every boy that I knew had a pocket knife that was carried every day.   Yes, we got in fights but nobody ever tried to pull a knife.  I never stabbed anyone or cut anybody's throat, at least..... not yet. 

We made sling shots and flips and shot rocks, BB's or just about anything else.  There were red rubber inner tubes then that were the coveted ones to cut the rubber from.  The red ones were made with more real rubber and performed much better than the black ones but the black ones would do if nothing else

was available.  The sling shot handle usually came from a privet bush but most any bush crotch would do.  Of course, as everyone knows, the difference between a sling shot and a "Flip" is the flip handle was made from a single wooden cloths pin that we got at home.


Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
Thomas Jefferson 

GROWING UP IN THE 40'S - Part 3

Dumb Stunts and Mischief:

 (Don't tell my kids about any of this because they think that their Daddy was perfect)

We were pretty good kids by today's standards but we did get into some mischief at times.  Some kid had an old auto hubcap and we came up with a real neat game.  we would hide in the bushes and wait until a car would go by and then we would throw the hubcap out in the street.  It would roll around and make enough noise that the car would usually stop and the driver would get out to get what he thought was his hubcap.  We took turns doing this and we would run out and grab the hubcap and run off with it.  If the driver chased us we would make a good chase of it and if they got too close we would throw the hubcap down and keep on running.  They would finally give up and go back to their car only to notice that there were not any of their hubcaps missing. ( I learned many of my new words that way.)

I had taken a few turns before but one day I threw the hubcap out behind a new Oldsmobile and ran out, picked it up, and ran down the street.  The driver had gotten out and I looked back... he had a pistol in his hand.  I heard a shot and threw the hubcap down and ran as fast as I could.  I saw Old Lady Sprouse's (sorry, that's what we called her) fence ahead of me and I remember reaching up and touching the top of her high wood fence and sailing over it like a bird.  Under normal conditions I would not have been able to even climb that fence.  I didn't play that game any more.  (We thought that Mrs Sprouse was a German spy because she spoke with an accent.)

Another game we geniuses thought up was that we would stand with a couple of us on each side of the road.  When a car would approach we would all pull back like we were pulling a rope tight across the street.  The cars would usually slam on the brakes and maybe skid to a stop.  We would laugh and run off.  (I said that we were good, not smart.)  I learned some more words.

They were building a new school and they had built a fine ramp to get up on the roof with wheelbarrows.  The ramp was a magnet for kids on bicycles and after the workers left for the day we would ride bikes up and down the ramps.  After the roof was poured it was a huge flat place to ride.  That became tame after a while and we decided to see who could ride between a board that was going to hold the tar on the roof and the outside of the roof.  This was a space about 6 inches wide.  All went well until my buddy rode off of the roof and fell into a pile of gravel.  Nothing was broke except that his bike's front wheel was sort of warped and flat on one side.

I don't know what you would call it but we called it "Tree Topping".   We would climb trees that were growing close together and make them sway back and fourth enough to go from one tree to another.  Poplar trees were our favorite.  As far as I know nobody ever got hurt doing this.

A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore.
Yogi Berra 

GROWING UP IN THE 40'S - Part 2

The war ended and the troops came home.  By the way, we won that one.  (The last one we tried to win).  Daddy came home and we moved back to Millegeville and he operated a service station there.  Millegeville was and is a nice town and it had some very neat things.  It was the old state capitol before the war for southern independence (so called Civil War) before the capitol was moved to Atlanta and it had the train tracks go right down the main street of town.  The train would chug through town very slowly and stop all the traffic.  If the red light was red the train would even stop if it had time.  That was a very impressive sight to me of that big black engine with black smoke pouring out of the top and the white steam popping off and blowing that whistle.  I hated to see the steam trains go.  Well, I also hated to see all of our passenger trains go...  We visited the town last year and the train tracks have been taken out of town.

The train tracks went down the street in the front of our school playground and the engineers would blow the whistle and wave at us as it passed.  We could see the passengers in the windows and on the platforms at the end of cars and they would wave as they slowly passed.  Us poor little kids were all tired out having to wave at all those folks.

We lived on Jefferson Street just south of the Georgia Military College (GMC) and our school was in front of GMC and not far from the point where the train tracks joined the main street.  It was a short walk from our house to the tracks and the tracks led through the woods and to a high railroad trestle over a large creek.  (A recent trip back to Millegeville showed that the trestle was not so high and the creek was not nearly as large as it appeared to me as a small boy.)

That period of time was great for us kids as we had freedom to go and play as long as we were back for meals and by dark.  We liked to go and walk the trestle over the creek because it showed our bravery (or stupidity).  You know how the railroad tracks are laid over the cross ties and over gravel?  Well, the trestle was the same except that there was no gravel.  Instead, it had wide open spaces between the cross ties and no handrails. We never had any trouble crossing the trestle until one day we heard a whistle blow, looked up, and there was a train coming right at us.  We ran back across the trestle, managed not to fall between the cross ties, and then jumped off into the creek as the train went by.  No, we never told anybody about it and, as far as I know, it was never reported to the police.  (A mark of manhood is that the boy has taken a whiz off of a train trestle at least once.)  Believe it or not, we got away with the wet pants that had dried enough by the time we had to be home.  Don't tell my Mom! 

We were free to ride our bikes all over and down south of town we found an abandoned brick yard.  It was a wonderful place for a young boy.  There were huge brick ovens with iron doors that, to us, was a castle.  It had a frame of rollers going down to an abandoned railroad spur.  We went all over town and drained the last drop of motor oil out of every used oil can at the gas stations to free them up so they would roll.  It was as close to "Six Flags" as we could get!

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Mark Twain 

GROWING UP IN THE 40's

I am tired from all this hard work so let's take a break from it for a while.  

I know that this may come as a surprise to you but, I am not a professional writer.  This part will be a series of stories, lies, and casual observations on my life and times growing up in the 1940's.   We will do the 50's later and there will be a lot more of our family on the wild frontier.

WW II song click here.

One of my earliest memories was of our country being at war.  You may have heard of it.  They called it World War II.  (It was in all the newspapers.)  Daddy was working as a machinist at the Naval Ordinance Plant in Millegeville, GA and everyone else was going in the military so Daddy tried to volunteer for the Navy.  There was a small problem, he was somewhat color blind and failed the Navy exam so he tried the Army.  The Army physical was that they would feel of you and if you were warm, you were in.  His job was making shells for the big naval guns.  Daddy had a necessary job and would not have been drafted anyway and having a small child (me) provided another reason why he would not have had to go.

Daddy left for training and Mom and I moved to Atlanta to live with Mom's Mother and Father.  While living with them I remember helping pull a child's wagon filled with cans mashed flat and used cooking grease and fat down to be turned in at the A&P store to be used in the war effort. 

We think now that the US population was safe in WWII but that was not known then.  An entire bomber plant complex in California was covered with camouflage netting and looked like a suburban subdivision from the air.   The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor with planes from aircraft carriers a long way  from their country and the Germans were sinking our ships just outside of our harbors.  The Germans were also bombing England, so it was not known if they could or would bomb us.

I noticed that they would close curtains at night but hadn't thought why.  The war was far away from us but the people didn't know that it would stay that way.  There was a knock at the door one night and there was a man wearing a World War I steel helmet standing there and he told Granddaddy that he had a light showing.  Granddaddy thanked him and closed the drapes tighter as he explained to me that the man was our air raid warden. 

The old time radio was great.  I remember lying on the floor in front of a radio as big as a chest of drawers with the amber light behind the dial and listening for hours at night.  Of course, nobody had air conditioning back then so everyone had open windows and doors in the summer and you could walk down the street and not miss any of the popular radio shows.  Many of the popular radio shows transferred over to early TV such as "The Loan Ranger", "Gunsmoke", and "The Great Gildersleve" comes to mind.

Early TV was a wonder to me.  TV stations didn't sign on with

programming until late afternoon or evening.  At other times, if they were even broadcasting anything, it was a "Test Pattern".  The patterns would vary, I guess, but I remember the one with an Indian head with feathers and a lot of small ticky marks around the screen.  The reason for this was

you needed to turn the TV on early so it could warm up and you would need to adjust everything so that when programming started you would be ready.

Very few people even had TV's back then and I remember going into a friends house after dark and walking through a  dark living room full of neighbors sitting in folding chairs all around the room who had come over to watch the new TV.  A few small boys, me included, were quite often standing on the sidewalk outside of the hardware store watching whole cowboy movies through the front window.   

Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
Will Rogers

DEBBIE'S WEDDING

We thought that we would have the building schedule well in hand, but...., not even close.  Our oldest daughter, Debbie, was getting married and she wanted to be married at the new ranch.  Of course, we will have plenty of time to get ready for a wedding ...... 

The wedding was to be take place down by the waterfall.  It was a beautiful place, especially in  the spring when the mountain laurel is blooming.  The wedding was to be just a few days before the mountain laurel would bloom but it was still a very pretty place.  I laid out a path to the waterfall with a gentle slope for the guests to use and cut out the brush for the "Bridle Path".  Well the kids went down to the waterfall all the time and they would just go down the steep bank and that was what they did on the wedding day.  Wade Stallings and Mrs Stallings just followed the kids down the bank and came the hard way.  Luckily, nobody fell down.

Andy, Debbie's intended, built a small bridge to go from rock to rock on the creek to get the wedding party over to the larger rock where the ceremony was to take place.  That part went well and Andy finished the bridge well ahead of time and it even held the load.  A failure of the bridge would have made for a more memorable day with a wet Bride and Groom.  They could have said anything during the ceremony because the waterfall was making so much noise we could not hear what they were saying.

Back to the house.  We didn't have the painting done yet but we had to go ahead and get the carpet installed anyway because we were about out of time.  We were painting late into the night before the wedding with the carpet already down.  Our normal way of doing things, of course, was backwards.  If it had not been for the help of our friends, Carlene and Larry Dunn, we would not have made it.

By that time we even had running water and two working bathrooms. heating and an attic fan, doors on the rooms, painted walls, carpet, a stove and refrigerator and kitchen cabinets!  Pretty luxurious living compared to where we had been.

We had a lot of rain just before the big day but, somehow, the wedding went went well and nobody got stuck in the mud. We had a house full of friends and family share the day with us and !!!!! then the next day we were able to bring all our furniture up from the basement and start living like somewhat normal people again.  

We still planned to plant fruit trees, grapes, and asparagus that would bear every year and we did all that.  We raised pigs, cows, rabbits, and a chicken.  More about that later.

Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone.
Frederic Bastiat

THAT WATER WAS COLD!

     We thought that we had it all figured out before hand.  I had saved up a lot of vacation days at IBM and would take them when we were building the house.  No problem, lots of time for us to do a lot of the work our self and save money.  Uh huh, it didn't work out as well as we hoped.  The fact that we didn't know what we were doing or what we were in for was not as obvious as one would think.  

     The house was dried in and they were due to come and hang the sheet rock and we were going to insulate the house and hang the vapor barrier.  It was to be a very well insulated house with 6 inch fiberglass insulation in the walls and 15 inch in the ceiling.  We had storm windows and well sealed wood windows.  The concrete foundation had foam insulation outside covered with stucco.  We had commercial quality steel insulated doors and the house did prove easy to heat as we heated until after Christmas with only the circulating fireplace.

     We had a two story living room/ dining room with a cathedral type ceiling (20 feet) that was very impressive if you weren't the one hanging on the ladder while Nancy kept it from sliding down.  Working with fiberglass insulation is always fun but working with it overhead is especially interesting.  I don't think we had an inch on us that was not itching.  We finished the insulation at about 12 midnight and went back up to camp to take a shower.  Of course our solar heated shower was COLD by then and the water coming from a deep well didn't help.  I will say one thing.  That cold water must have popped out all those little fiberglass strands because the next day we didn't have any itching.

     They say that experience is the best teacher and I suppose that is true.  Better yet, to learn from someone else's  experience is much better.   We did it the hard way.  NEVER hire someone to hang sheet rock knowing that they will not be the one to finish it.  Guess how I know that. 

     They did not do a very good job and they didn't try to protect the vapor barrier.  We eventually got the sheet rock  all finished and by then I almost knew how to do it in a reasonable time.  If you sanded some sheet rock anywhere  the dust would immediately travel to the farthest corner of the house.

     After the sheet rock was finished I put up the solid wood colonial doors, the baseboard, trimmed out the windows and finished the rest of the trim.  We finished the woodwork and were ready to paint the house.

Next, a wedding! 

A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circlue of our felicities.
Thomas Jefferson 


     

THE LITTLE RED CAR

Debbie and Janet  (1967)

     A few months before Christmas I saw an article in a magazine about building a battery powered kids car using an automobile generator as a motor.  I figured that I had over a couple of months to build it and that would be plenty of time.  Wrong!  I did finish it but I had to put in every spare minute I could on it and I was upholstering the seat about 2:am on Christmas morning and still had a few touch up things to do after Christmas.

     First, I started by building the body and that went very well.  (Probably because I mainly followed the directions in the magazine).   The body was built out of 3/4 inch plywood and was very sturdy.   The steering knuckles were made out of iron plumbing "T"s.  My neighbor worked for The Exide Battery Company that manufactured golf cart batteries and he said that from time to time they would have one come off of the line with the top put on too early after welding the cell and the heat would cause the top to bubble up.  I could get one of those "seconds" cheaper and they were as good as the others so I waited on one of them.
      A friend from high school and guy I worked with, Jim Muse, had a welder and made the steering wheel and brake pedal for me.  I ordered a generator from Sears and tried it out after I got a battery but it didn't have enough power to pull on level ground much less on the hills.  I was looking at a Ford starter motor and it had an open shaft and would fit in the space.  I bought one to use but it had a shaft way too long so I had to saw it off.  It could not be returned after the shaft was sawed off so I was committed to using it.    

     I sawed it off and tried it on my bare chassis and, YES, IT HAD ENOUGH POWER!  I  was kneeling on it to connect the jumper cables and it took off dragging me across the basement floor with me hanging on.  It was too fast for the size pulleys that I was using.  I changed to the largest pulley that would fit on the driving wheel and the smallest pulley that would fit on the motor shaft.  It was going to be faster than I wanted but I was out of time for  more experimenting so I went ahead with it.   I planned on adding another pulley and shaft to "gear it down" later but Debbie handled it fine even though it would go at a fast running speed.  (See the video).  The brake was a piece of "V" belt wrapped around another pulley that tightened when the brake pedal was pressed and stopped the car very well and would lock the wheel with a good press.  The car had plenty of power to spare so I made a sort of a trailer hitch to hook their coaster wagon on the back.  It didn't seem to slow the car down any even with the extra weight of another kid.


     Christmas morning went well and Debbie caught on quickly to driving the little car and her and Janet took some rides early that morning.  They rode down the hill of our subdivision and turned around and rode back up followed quickly by our down the street neighbor.  The car, being electric, was very quiet.  A neighbor ran up to me and said "She coasted down the hill and then turned around and coasted back up the hill.  How did she do that?"  I showed him that it was electric and not magic.

    Nancy's family was coming over for Christmas Day and during the day many rides were given to all of the cousins.  The Ford starter motor was never intended to be a continuous duty motor and would overheat after a while.  It had to be parked to cool off.  Later, I guessed the total amount of time the little car had run that day and realized that Debbie could have, and probably would have, driven to the shopping center.  The following Monday I bought and wired in a key lock switch for the car.

     I had promised Nancy that the car couldn't turn over because the golf cart battery weighed about 70 pounds and was mounted about 2 inches above the street level.  WRONG, Debbie somehow managed to slide it sideways into the curb in a tight turn in the sand and it dumped both of them out into the grass and the car then fell back on four wheels. Lucky it didn't break anything.  Oh, the girls were okay too.

     Yes, the picture is me riding the car.  You can't let children ride anything that is untested.  Research, don't ya know.

(NOTE:  No, it was not that warm on Christmas.  These pictures are from Easter.  Some video is Christmas. )

A recent independent study has shown that it takes less energy to lower a toilet seat than to raise it.

Anonymous

IT WAS ALL NANCY'S FAULT.

     Before our move to Hall county we lived in Red Oak, GA for about 13 years.  Nancy planted a couple of tomato plants by the south brick wall of our new house there.  I don't know if it was the heat radiated by the bricks or the lime in the concrete of the fairly new slab of our family room, but those tomato plants produced a lot of tomatoes.  

     Later, Nancy and our neighbor were talking and the neighbor had some seeds left from planting her garden and they hoed up a small area of the back yard and planted a sort of "starter" garden for Nancy.  The small garden produced an impressive amount vegetables.  It also gave Nancy something to do since she only had five of our kids, four of her sisters kids, the house, and me to care for.  Finally, a good use of some of her spare time.

     Nancy's garden produced enough that she canned food for later in the winter.  We would rent a tiller in the spring to till the garden and tend it with a hoe the rest of the season.  As the garden grew in size, we bought a tiller of our own.  The garden grew in size as long as we lived there. 

     We also would go to the Farmers Market and bring back produce in bulk and Nancy canned much of it.  The garage floor and the family room floor were sometimes covered with veggies waiting their turn in the canning pot.  I remember once we were at the farmers market on a Sunday and we had already bought quite a lot when we got a real "Deal" on two big boxes of tomatoes that were just about the peak of ripeness.  I had to go to work the next day and Nancy canned it all.  (Ya ever wonder why I answer Nancy with "Yes Mam"?)

     I guess this was the start of our wanting to move to the country and looking back on it, I'm still glad that we did.    


"This year will go down in history.  For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration.  Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!"
Adolph Hitler, 1935