No Little Thing Bill Powell Oral History

No Little Thing: Bill Powell in his own words
An oral history taken by Ingrid Koehler

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Introduction

This book is the edited transcript of
recordings I took with my maternal
grandfather William Carson Powell, known as
Bill, in 1998 or 1999, during a vacation to
Tennessee.
At the time, I made the recordings I was
living in Coventry, England and working at the
Local Government Ombudsman. The
Ombudsman there was Jerry White, the
former Chief Executive of the London
Borough of Hackney and an historian of
London. At the time, he was working on the

History of London in the 20th Century, but he had
already completed a book about the East End
of London that was based on a series of
interviews with East End residents, in other
words, oral history. I asked him about how to
take an oral history and his answer was more
or less – just ask open ended questions.
I was beginning to have an interest our
own family history around this time. My
grandparents, Mirjam Stohl Koehler and Bill
and Tut Powell (born Pauline Ruth Bottoms)
had done a fair bit of work on compiling
family histories that provided an excellent
basis for my budding, but now dormant,
curiosity. Perhaps the combination of this
interest and working with Jerry prompted me
to attempt to take an oral history of Bill.

A note on the recording and transcription

I used an inexpensive tape recorder and a
stack of cheap cassette tapes to take the
history. The tapes themselves are noisy and
difficult to hear. I probably recorded close to
twenty hours of tape, with the majority having
usable content.
I transcribed the tapes myself over 2000
and 2001. That itself was a lesson in
listening. I was amazed by the clarity and
fluidity of his story telling. He rarely
digressed, and where he did, it was always
interesting and relevant. Through the
process I gained a new appreciation for his
ability as a storyteller and an awareness of
my own failure to listen fully. I was chilled to
the bone transcribing his war stories and his
description of the constant and present

danger. But I do not remember feeling that
way during the original telling.
Although I was as careful as I could be,
I’m not a transcriber and I’m merely an
adequate typist. This text is no doubt full of
transcription errors and misheard words.
Where I was unsure of names or whole
words, I’ve usually indicated with a question
mark or some other notation. I have done my
best to identify the correct spelling of
individuals’ names or place names.

War stories

Like many men of his generation, Bill never
talked about his experiences as a soldier
during WWII. As a child, I did ask him and
I’m sure his daughters, my cousins and
brother asked him as well. He told a very
few stories about the war. In the end, he
said he decided that he would tell some of
his story partly because he had begged and
begged his great-grandmother (Mammy) to
tell him her experience of the Civil War as
she had lived in Union occupied Wilson
County, Tennessee but she would never tell
him. Though in the end she told him it
wasn’t as bad as he thought. He said he
imagined it probably much worse than what it
was, and he didn’t want us to imagine his
war experiences as much worse than what
they were.
I think it likely that Mammy’s war
experiences were actually pretty horrible.
During some of my genealogy research I
discovered that one of my relatives, a young
man, had been shot and killed for failing to
return home before curfew. And Bill’s story

as recounted here sounds pretty awful –
even if his time in the front was relatively
brief. No doubt, many people had it much
worse and some never returned. But I
expect that he saw many more horrible
things than even he described in this
account.

Regrets

I lost a single tape of recordings which
contained his recollections of family history
that had been told to him by his older
relatives. That tape was never transcribed
and now, I suppose, those second and third
hand stories are entirely lost to history.
I very much regret that I never thought to
take oral histories of any of my other
grandparents. I can’t blame myself too
much for not taking Tut’s history as she died
when I was thirteen or for my paternal
grandfather Wallace Conrad Koehler as he
died when I was 15. But my other
grandmother had a wealth of stories that I
would have liked to have collected. My own
parents probably have stories, too that I
would like to see preserved, but perhaps it’s
in the nature of the relationship that I feel
unable to do this. Their memories may be
mine as well, and I suppose I’d feel duty
bound to my own version of the truth.

Bill Powell was born in Wilson County,
Tennessee on July 13, 1917 to Neal Powell
and Nell Carson Powell. He died in May
1993.

Bill’s family background

Bill’s parents

My mother was the oldest of six children.
And her mother died when she was 12 years
old, and her daddy must have also. Her
daddy died before her mother did. They all
stayed real close. They were all real close.
All of ‘em. They visited with each other. I
went and lived with ‘em and stayed with
‘em and their children lived and stayed with
us. We went visited with ‘em on Sundays.
And they were all close by. I guess we were
sorta in the center of ‘em and I don’t guess
there was a one of ‘em that lived over six
miles from where we lived.
None of ‘em ever moved very far from
Lebanon except my Aunt Frances who
married a Vann. They moved to Knoxville.
And they were real good to me and to
Virginia while we were going to school up at
Knoxville. She was the last one to die – no
Uncle Walter was the last one to die. Uncle
Walter was the youngest of the boys and
Aunt Frances was the youngest of the girls.
My mother and daddy were raised not as
orphans, but my daddy’s daddy died when
he was a few weeks old and he had a
brother that was four years old, Uncle Ben.
They had to do lots of things to make a living,
their mother did. She ran a boarding house
at Lebanon, she worked as a matron David
Lipscomb College and finally she and one of
her sisters wound up with a small farm that
was part of her daddy’s farm. That’s a long
story about how that was, we won’t go into

that. But anyway, they were raised pretty
poor but pretty honest. My mother and
daddy got married when my daddy was, I
believe seventeen and mother was fifteen. It
might have been seventeen and nineteen;
I’m not sure about that. I had two brothers,
one older than me and one younger than me.
The younger was called Fred. The older one
died in the flu epidemic during World War
One. And the younger one was scalded in
accident. They lacked medical things. They
couldn’t keep his clothes from sticking to
him. He eventually died.
I remember when he burned himself with
scalding water though I was not quite three
years old I don’t guess, but I remember that
very distinctly. He was seven months. Both
of ‘em were seven months. Clyde was
seven months old when he died. ‘Course I
never saw him, ‘cause he died before I was
born. So, my mother never talked about that
at all even when my sister was born, she
never told her about it.
Virginia only found out about it when she
accidentally found a clipping out of a
newspaper when she was – oh probably ten
years old. She was so surprised that she
didn’t know what to do, so she went to our
grandmother and asked her if it was so. And
she told her that it was. She just couldn’t
understand why her mother had never told
her, but she hadn’t. And I never heard her
say anything in my life.

Boyhood Home

This home where we lived was at one time
Linwood Academy, and Mammy taught there

and her husband, James B Powell taught
there and the house, the schoolhouse, had
gotten into pretty bad shape when my
mother and daddy bought it. It never was
fixed up until after I left and Virginia was
grown and then they fixed it up some better,
but we had a fireplace in the room where
mother and daddy slept. It had a double-
stacked chimney, and on the other side was
in the kitchen and we had a fireplace there
and it was a long room in the kitchen, we had
a stove in the other end of the kitchen, and in
the middle we had a table that we ate from,
and there were windows over this table and
in cold weather with the fire going in the
fireplace in one end and the cook-stove in
the other end, at night the bucket with the
dipper in it would freeze, in cold weather. It
was a pretty open house. Insulation was
never heard of, and we lived like that for a
long time.

An accidental scalding

I don’t know whether I’ve told you about
the deal on the fireplace, in the front or not,
but I had a brother Fred, who was two years
younger than I was and he was about seven
months old, so I would have been a little over
two, and we were there in the room and in
those times, you pulled fire coals out on the
hearth and set a black tea kettle on those fire
coals to heat water. And for some reason, he
was big enough to crawl, he crawled over
and reached out and got the handle on that
tea kettle, pulled it over, spilt water all across
the hearth, and it ran down under him and
scalded him evidently something terrible.

And I can remember that, I can remember
seeing him reach out. And I remember my
mother coming and getting him, calling for
my daddy, who was down in the field to
come to the house, and I don’t remember
anything else about that deal until I
remember us being in church, and my
mother having on a black veil, and crying.
And then I don’t remember any more about
him for a long, long time. And my mother or
daddy, either one, ever said anything to me
about that, and my sister was born twelve
years later, and they never told her about
that. And she only knew about it, because
she read a clipping that my mother had in a
box in cedar chest out in the hall that told
about it. And she wouldn’t even ask my
mother about it, she went down to our
grandmother’s, Mammy’s, and asked her if
that was so. And, of course, it was.
They didn’t know to put tea leaves on
burns at that time, and unguentine had not
been invented, and they didn’t have anything
to put on the flesh to keep the diapers from
sticking. And they finally ordered some
unguentine from New York. I don’t know
how long it took to get there, but he must
have been dead before it did get there, and it
set around out in what we called the
creamery for a long time. And I think my
Daddy finally used it for axel grease, came in
little pound cans.

Hard scrabble farming

But anyway, my mother and daddy bought
a little farm, seventy acres on the credit.
They had to pay for it raising corn and turning

hogs in the corn fields and let ‘em hog it
down. They sold the hogs to pay what they
could on the farm and they had a rough,
rough go of it. They finally bought another
little farm, pretty much on the credit. There
came a big flood, it was on a hillside, and
washed all the top soil off. And the
Depression hit, and they had a hard time
paying for that.
So when I was about 13 years old, I think I
told you about this, my daddy decided they
had to have a cash crop of some kind, and
he investigated cotton and sweet potatoes
and soy beans and he finally came to the
conclusion that he’d try tobacco. And
tobacco proved quite profitable. And he
finally got the place paid for after I had
already finished high school and started
college. He told people he never did get out
of debt ‘til I left home.
But he was joking about that. My mother
and daddy were both real good to me and
my grandmother – on my daddy’s side – I
never knew my grandmother on my
mother’s side, because she died when my
mother was 12 years old, the oldest of six
children. So I never did know that
grandmother at all. But I knew her
grandmother, my great-grandmother called
Old Mammy, but that’s off the subject.

Mammy

I don’t know if you ever heard me talk
about Mammy or not. She was my great
grandmother. Cassander Johnson Carson.
She was the one that took the six children
and parcelled em out among her children.

Said you take this one and you take that one
and you take the other one. She took my
mother and her brothers and sisters and
parcelled ‘em out among her children. She
was the grandmother of all of them.
We always went to my grandmother’s,
Mammy’s on Christmas day and that was
about a mile from where we lived, maybe we
went on Christmas Eve, I don’t know. But
anyway, they got me dressed, put on my little
short pants that came down below my knees
and black stockings that pulled up under my
knees, with a rubber band cut out of an inner
tube to hold them up. It was rainy and muddy
and they told me not to do anything to get
dirty before we went to Mammy’s. Well, I
headed for the road and the mud puddles
and ran up and down the road splashing the
mud puddles all over me. I never did do that
but once. That was the end of that.
My grandmother, that I called Mammy,
owned a little place on the creek, which you
all have probably seen. Or you have, Ingrid,
where Uncle Ben and Mammy lived. But at
that time, Uncle Ben was married and lived in
Gallatin on a farm that his wife and his wife’s
mother owned. And my mother and daddy
lived with Mammy. And I was born there.
Then shortly thereafter, Uncle Ben’s wife
died, and he and Robert, his son, who was
five or six years old at the time moved back
there to live with Mammy, and Mother and
Daddy got out and bought the place where
we lived all of my life after we left Mammy’s,
my grandmother’s.
And we moved up there when I was, I
guess, two years old and I didn’t like it at all.
And I decided I would run away and go back

down to Mammy’s, and I don’t know how I
got as far as I did, but I got a piece of the
way from the house, and trying to get
through a barbed wire fence, and they say I
still have a scar on the back of my head, or I
did for a long time, where I got hung up on
that barbed wire fence. And they saw me, or
heard me, or something, but anyway they got
me and brought me back home.
I remember one time when we were going
down there, the creeks were up and there
were two different ways that you could go.
The creek in front of Mammy’s house was
so high we knew we couldn’t go that way,
so we went to the left, the other way. And I
remember going across with old Charlie and
the buggy and mother and daddy and I
remember feelin’ that buggy drift
downstream from the power of the water
that was in the creek, and that’s the things I
remember when I was little.

Neal’s Paymaster

My great-uncle was William Haskell Neal
and he really was the only daddy that my
daddy ever knew, because my granddaddy
died when my daddy was only a few weeks
old and he was the only boy in a family of
seven. He came and picked up my
grandmother and her two boys in the
Tucker’s Cross Road community and helped
them get started, there’s a story I’ll tell you

sometime about how she inherited a small
part of her daddy’s property and lived there
for a long, long time. But my daddy helped
him a lot, Uncle Haskell.
Uncle Haskell didn’t have any education,
but he had a lot of common sense or
anticipation or knowledge that he didn’t
really understand he just had it and at that
particular time the only corn that was raised
in the whole United States was one-eared
corn. They didn’t know anything about it,
except a stalk with one ear on it. He noticed
in gathering the corn out that sometimes
there’d be stalks with two ears on it, so he
put a little box on the side of his wagon bed
and every stalk that he found with two ears
on it, he’d put those two ears in that box.
Then the next year when they planted, he
would plant seed corn from those ears that
were in this box. The number of two-eared
stalks increased each year and he continued
doing that for years. Finally he selected seed
corn for so long from two-eared stalks that
he got to where better than 90% of the corn
would have two ears.
It was a novelty to the Tennessee
Department of Agriculture, and it was a
novelty to everybody that he could raise two-
eared corn. Nobody else could. So he or
somebody put a name on it and called it
Neal’s Paymaster. And it was called
Paymaster because you could double and
triple and quadruple the yield of corn in
Tennessee. My daddy helped him gather the
corn, and then in the Spring of the year all of
the neighbors would gather around and the
kinfolk and they would shell this corn.

It was sold as Neal’s Paymaster all over
the country and was very profitable to him,
although he didn’t make a lot of money on it
because he didn’t sell it very high. People
came from great distances to get it. His son
Pallas Neal, which has the same name as
Uncle Haskell’s daddy, and another son Paul
Neal continued to grow this corn from the
original seed after Uncle Haskell died. And
then this son Pallas had a son named
Kenneth who was a farmer and farmed some
of the same land in the same neighborhood
and he continued with Neal’s Paymaster and
a lot of people continued to want it for a long,
long time.
Eventually the hybrids came in and that
took over from the open pollinated corn –
which this was. Uncle Haskell didn’t know
anything about what hybrid corn was but he
knew something and no one really knew what
he knew, but he knew enough that he was
covering up some of the ears with sacks and
saving that corn to see what it would do. But
that never did amount to much, because
smarter people with education took over and
developed the hybrid corn.
But this one grandson of his, Kenneth, died
this week and he had a funeral in Lebanon.
He had been a farmer all his life, very active
in church work, very active in the farm
bureau, active in the various clubs in
Lebanon. And on this casket, when they
buried him, they had a pall made out of fall
colors. It was a pale green casket and there
were green flowers on there and mums and
pumpkins and various fall items, thanksgiving
items I guess you would say. But then also
they had stalks and ears of Neal’s

Paymaster corn. And that was the pall
instead of flowers as you usually see the
palls. And he was seventy-some years old.
He has three sons that still farm. And I
presume that one of them will continue to try
to hold the purity of the Neal’s Paymaster
corn – though it’s an open pollinated corn
and it’s hard to maintain the purity of it. But
I presume they will.
I know people here in Lawrence County,
which is close to a hundred miles from where
this Neal’s Paymaster corn was grown
would drive from Lawrence County up to
where this Neal farm was to buy Neal’s
Paymaster corn. It was different looking, the
kernels were. If you really knew well, you
could tell it. And that’s really all I know
about that story. But that line hasn’t run out.
The corn hasn’t run out and the Neals
haven’t run out.
Of course, my grandmother was a Neal.
The sister to Uncle Haskell Neal. He was a
great help to her and a great help to my
uncle and daddy. As I say, my daddy thought
of him as the only daddy he ever had. He
had three or four boys. He had James and
Pallas and Paul and Willy. And daddy liked
Willy and he liked Paul and he got along with
Pallas alright. Although Pallas was a pretty
hard man on his family and everybody else.
And then he had one named James, and my
daddy never liked him at all and I never knew
why.
My daddy’s name was James Neal Powell
and he refused to acknowledge the James in
this name. In the family bibles and anything
else that he could find James Neal in it, he
scratched the James part out ‘cause he

didn’t want anything to do with this James
Neal.
But for some reason we went to James
Neal’s wedding. I remember going to it in
the dark. It was at night, and it was in a
house where of course there was no
electricity; they had oil lamps and all those
things. We went in a Model T Ford, and we
went down Turner Hill to get to this house
where James and his bride were being
married.
When we came back the car wouldn’t
come up the hill because the gas tank was
located lower than the carburettor. There
wasn’t enough gas in the tank to get to the
carburettor, so we had to turn around and
back the Model T up the hill in order to get on
top of the hill. And that’s all I remember of
that story.

Turkey Bill

Turkey Bill was my Daddy’s uncle, actually
his wife was my Daddy’s aunt -- and they
lived not far from where our home was. And
when was a little boy, he helped his uncle
Billy McDaniel drive turkeys. They would go
up, about where Albert Gore lives, up in
Carthage, Gainsborough, Salida, up in that
area in there and start buying turkeys and
drivin’ ‘em toward Lebanon. And they
would start out with a few and just keep
addin’ to ‘em, bringin’ ‘em on down the
road. And when night came the turkeys went
to roost, and if the drivers didn’t have a
place to stay they had to just camp out in the
open, ‘cause when a turkey goes in a tree
to roost, and especially tame ones, you

can’t get ‘em out. They’re just there,
that’s all there is to it. And they would have
hundreds of ‘em, and maybe thousands of
‘em by the time they got to Lebanon with
‘em and they’d put ‘em on a train then and
ship ‘em to Nashville, and he did that for so
long and bought so many turkeys that they
got to callin’ him Turkey Bill. He never had
heard of Chicken George of course at that
time. But he was Turkey Bill.

Chapter Two, Boyhood

Horse whipped

When you went to the fair, ‘course
everybody had horses then, rode buggies,
you needed a whip for your horse and for
your buggy and for everything else. And I
don’t know the cost, probably fifteen, twenty
cents, maybe a quarter, I don’t know what
they cost, But anyway, they were beyond my
reach and I couldn’t get one. And I surely
did want one.
Some of my daddy’s cousins were
plowin’ corn on the side of the road as I was
going to school, and for some reason I
stopped and started talkin’ to them and one
of them had a whip. And we got to talkin’
about the whip, and I was talkin’ about how
bad I wished I had one, and this old boy that
was there, one of my daddy’s cousins said,
“Well, if you won’t whip that pony, I’ll give
you this whip.” No, no I wouldn’t whip this
pony at all if he’d give me the whip.
Well he gave me the whip and I rode the
pony all the way to school and put him in the
stable and didn’t whip him at all, comin’
back that afternoon, coming back to where
they were plowin’ the corn on the side of the
road, for some reason I decided I would whip
the pony. And I don’t guess he’d ever had
a whip laid on him before, and he jumped
pretty hard and far and wide and I landed on
the side of the road and the horse went on
down the road. They just laughed and
laughed and laughed.

A neighbor down the road saw my horse
in the creek getting’ a drink of water and he
caught him and brought him on back to me
and told me to get on him and ride him home.
And I told him I was not going ride that horse
any more anywhere. He said, “Well, lead
him home then. Here he is.”
So I led him a little piece, but pretty soon I
got on him and rode him on home. That’s
the end of that story. I rode that pony to
school every morning. I don’t know why, but
my daddy always caught that pony and
brought him up close the house with the
saddle and bridle on him and I got on him and
took off to school.

A switchin’

One day, I don’t know, we’d had a little
round about something, I don’t know what it
was about, but I got on my pony and instead
of headin’ for school I headed the other way.
I had forgotten all about it, it didn’t mean
anything to me, but they thought I was
runnin’ off. But all I was doin’ was goin’ up
to a neighbor’s house to talk to some boys
up there that had gone huntin’ and trappin’
at various times with me. We had a bunch of
possums and pole cats and what not that we
had skinned and we were talkin’ about when
and where and how we were gonna sell the
hides. And they didn’t know what in the
world was going on, so a lot of little things
happened.
I made a terrible mistake one time, I don’t
know what happened, but I did something
that displeased my daddy and I had rubber
boots that came up to my knees and he

picked up a switch or had a switch or
something, anyway, he gave me a good
switchin’ on the legs. But, of course, he
was hittin’ me on those boots, and I told him
“That didn’t hurt!”, and he said “Well,
we’ll come up a little higher and see if
that’ll hurt.” And it did. And I didn’t say
any more about that.

A pocket knife

When I was a little old boy, and like lots of
little boys, I was fascinated by knives. My
Uncle Ben had a real pretty little knife with a
real sharp blade. He always kept a sharp
knife, and I wanted to see it. He didn’t
much want me to see it and my daddy said
not to, but anyway somehow or another I
finally got to see it and I took it and stabbed it
in a locus tree. I remember where we were.
In our front yard there was four locust trees
that grew real close together and I was
standing sort of in the middle of them and I
stabbed this knife in one of those trees. I
didn’t have a good hold on the handle and
my hand slipped down the blade of the knife
and sliced into my hand down into the bone,
cut the leaders in two and that’s the reason
always now my little finger is still stiff on my
right hand and not as large as the little finger
on my left hand.
It hurt real bad, and my daddy said that
was good enough for me. We were
supposed to go pick beans that afternoon,
and I didn’t want to go ‘cause I’d hurt my
hand and he said if I hadn’t played with that
knife I wasn’t supposed to I wouldn’t have
hurt my hand, so let’s go pick beans.

He gave me a big basket and we picked
beans and got it full. I couldn’t carry it in my
left hand so I had to carry it in my right hand
and I guess that pulled my hand a little more.
But anyways it was a long time before my
finger got well and it’s always been stiff. I
would say I was about 8 or 9, pretty young.

Firewood

Those locust trees stood there for a long
time, til a storm came through and blew ‘em
down. The locust trees have pretty flowers
on ‘em that smell good. The bees liked ‘em
but they also have thorns on them and they
would fall off. Little old barefooted boys
runnin around would step on these thorns
and get ‘em up in their foot and then they
would start hurting and they would fester and
you had to lay down and hold your foot up
and let your mother take a needle and poke
around and stick and finally pick those thorns
out of there before they would get well. So I
was never very fond of locust trees.
We had a great big locust tree right
outside the front door of our house. I
remember it was a big one. The trunk was
as big around as you see on some big beech
trees, big poplar and big oak trees. It had a
big holler in it, and we lived up on a hill and
storms came through an awful lot. They
worried about that tree blowin over on our
house for a long time. Finally a storm blew
down some other locust trees, but didn’t
blow that one down. So my daddy cut it down
and cut it up into firewood. And we burned it
up a stick at a time one winter.

We had to heat our house with wood that
we cut. We would cut wood in August when
the leaves were beginning to come off and
the sap was going down and the wood was
pretty dry, but still enough moisture in it to
where you could saw it better than you could
when it was real dry.
We had to do it with a cross cut saw. You
pull the saw to me and backwards and
forwards. Backwards and forwards and we
piled up the wood back in the woods and
then I think about November or the last of
October we’d haul it up to the house and
ricked it up between those various locust
trees right at the house. We threw some of
the wood off down in a wood pile we had and
that wood had to be cut up in smaller chunks.
We’d split it and make firewood for the
stove. We’d pile up a great big pile of stove
wood. Great big, I guess six feet tall.
Lot of people just cut stove wood as they
needed it, but my daddy wanted to get it all
cut and piled up. Sometimes we’d rick it up
and sometimes we wouldn’t, but we always
ricked up the firewood for the fireplaces. I
had the job of carrying it out of the rick and
rickin’ it up on the porch. And we burned
lots of wood.

Boyhood home

We lived in a house that used to be an old
schoolhouse. Somebody had bought that
property with the old schoolhouse on it and
they took it and made it into a house to live
in. The man’s name was Curt North; I never

did see or know Curt North. But that was the
name, and that’s who my daddy bought 70
acres of land that had this school house that
had been made into a place to live in.
We lived there for a long time, and when I
lived there it never was insulated it was just
weather boarding on the outside, studding,
and then some kind of planks of stuff on the
inside that we’d put this canvas on and
paper it then. And the wind came in under
the doors through the cracks. In the room
where we stayed all the time there was a
hole about the size of a big marble in the
floor. When we’d clean the floor, we’d
pour soapy water, boiling hot water all over
the floors and mop it and sweep it out
through that hole.
And we took a bath once a week, whether
we needed it or not, in the room where we
stayed, where the big fireplace was. We’d
pull the shades on those windows. We must
have had 10 foot ceilings, I don’t know, they
were tall. And you’d buy curtains to put on
the windows, but they never could get
shades long enough to come all the way
down to the floor. So when we took a bath,
we’d have to get papers and put on the
shades down to the floor, so people couldn’t
see in and also to keep the cold out. We’d
put papers over the door, and heated water
boiling hot and pour it in a number two
washtub. My daddy would take a bath in that
number two wash tub, and put clean clothes
on, which he changed once a week whether
he needed to or not and poured the water
outside. Then we’d make another washing,
a tub full of water, and they’d put me in and
I’d take a bath. Then my mother would take

a bath in the water that I had just taken a
bath in. And then we all put on clean clothes
and that was it. Didn’t do any more bathin’
til the next Saturday night. We all had long
handle underwear, sleeves came down to
your arms, legs came down below your
ankles.
That old school house had lots of cracks
and crevices and loose windows and loose
doors and the wind would come through. It
wasn’t very substantial or solid, and we
would paper it every once in a while. It was
hard even to keep wallpaper on the walls. As
I told you, this house that we lived in was
very open, no insulation. And we’d take
damasking1(?), real thin damasking, and put it
on the wall first, and then we’d put the
paper over that, because the paper
wouldn’t stick to the wall, but it would stick
to the demastos (?) that you tacked onto the
wall, and we would get that fixed up. And
then when the wind blew real hard you could
see that paper shaking and movin’ about.
Eventually it’d crack and have to be
repapered again.
People’d come over just to visit a lot.
They’d come about dark, sit by the fire
about an hour and go home again. We had a
friend that came to visit us at nights a lot,
Dillon Beaver(?), And Mr Dillon never did
wash his hair, I don’t reckon. It was greasy,

1
: I wasn’t clear what damasking was or if I
heard correctly. There is such a thing as
damask wallpaper – but it’s usually flocked
and ornate ‘fabric’ style wallpaper which
doesn’t sound like what he’s describing
here

Lord, it was greasy. When he came he
always set over there on the south wall in a
straight backed chair, and lean back his head
onto the wall and the paper, and I don’t
reckon he ever washed his head, ever. It
was just as greasy as greasy as greasy
could be. And when he would leave, there
was such a big spot, that you can’t imagine,
where his head had messed up the
wallpaper. It would leave a great big old
greasy place, ‘cause he’d move about this
way and that about a foot and a half long and
about a half a foot deep. And my daddy
wouldn’t let my mother say anything to him
about it, and he wouldn’t say anything to him
about it either, but they sure didn’t like it.
My mother sure did hate to see him coming
when she just papered the house, ‘cause
she knew he was gonna leave a great big
greasy place on her new wallpaper.

Ingrid: Didn’t your neighbor ever notice the
greasy spot he left on the wall?
Bill: Well, he had greasy spots all over the
wall at his house, didn’t mean anything in
the world to him.

He had four children. Howard, Robert
Hugh, Sarah, and Frances. And they were all
about my age, but all younger than me.
Howard is dead. Robert Hugh was a
highway patrolman, he’s dead now.
Frances married an outlaw, I thought, maybe
he wadn’t, I don’t know. He’s dead,
she’s dead. And the only one living is the
youngest one, Sarah and she’s not able to
take care of herself anymore, so my sister
told me. But they had a first cousin, that was

named Bell, and he is one of the largest land
developers and construction people around
Lebanon, building houses around Lebanon.
And Lebanon is really on the boom in market
of expensive houses. She drove me through
a big golf course at a resort called Horn
Springs, and on those resorts they build
homes around the fairways, tees and this,
that and the other. And that’s the kind of
homes he builds, and the places he builds.
So you can’t ever tell what a little old hillbilly
boy from Lebanon and Carthage might do.

Hunting and trapping

I trapped and caught ‘possums and
polecats and coons. Tried to catch foxes.
Never did do much good at that. But there
was a black family that lived down below us.
They had good dogs and I went huntin’ with
them a lot. They’d come up to the house
about 4 o’clock in the morning, knock on the
porch and I’d have to get my clothes on real
fast and bounce out the door and we’d go
huntin.
They had dogs that would tree animals, in
holes or up in the trees, catch ‘em before
they could get in the hole or the tree. We’d
catch from none to four or five animals
before daylight. Then we had to come home.
And if we caught a pole cat, well, I’d change
clothes and wash a little, but had to wear the
same shoes and go to school and get in
there where they had a pot belly stove. You
could tell whether I’d caught a pole cat or
not.
We would skin the animals and sell the
hides. We usually carried ‘em to a country

store or we carried ‘em to Lebanon. Down
on the square there’s a statue standing of
General Stratton, I believe it is. It had an iron
fence around it and the fur buyers would
come and stand around that fence and you
would show ‘em your furs and they’d tell
you what they’d give you for it. If they
bought it, they’d pay you for it and hang it up
on that fence. They’d buy fur from all over
Wilson Co all day long. I reckon they carried
it to Nashville and sold it to somebody and
then it wound up being shipped to St. Louis
or Chicago or New York or somewhere
where they needed ‘em for coats and hats
and what have you.
We also caught rabbits. We dressed
them, that was simply takin the insides out
and leaving the fur and everything on ‘em.
We wouldn’t eat ‘em that way, but we’d
take those rabbits down there, too. They’d
give us a dime a piece for ‘em. And they
shipped them to Nashville, I don’t know
where. Somebody ate ‘em somewhere.
I ate rabbit, but I wouldn’t eat a rabbit
that had been done like that, whole and all.
But now in England at one time, they dressed
rabbits and hung them in the well. They’d
let ‘em hang there to where when the pulled
the hair it would slip off and come off. They
also hung chickens in the well and let them
hang there til where when you pulled the
feathers the feathers would come off. I
never would go for that either.

Chickens and kitchen gardening

We raised chickens, a lot of ‘em. The
ones we were gonna eat, we took ‘em and

put ‘em in a chicken coop and fed ‘em,
confined ‘em pretty tight, and fed ‘em corn
and gravy, I don’t know what all. Fattened
‘em up, and they would get fat in there. Sort
of like the French do with geese. They nail
their feet down to where they can’t move.
But these chickens were stuck tight in the
coop and they couldn’t move much.
After they’d been in there so long, we’d
take ‘em out and we’d either cut the heads
off or take ‘em and wring their heads off and
then dip ‘em in hot water. You had to be
careful and not dip ‘em too long. Then you
could pull the feathers out pretty easily. Then
you cut the chicken up and washed it real
good and put a little salt on ‘em. We never
would eat ‘em the day we killed ‘em.
We’d keep ‘em overnight and eat ‘em the
next day. But a lot of people would go out
and kill ‘em and cook ‘em and eat ‘em
right then. But we would never do that, I
don’t know why. We thought they were
better if you wait a day, I reckon. That’s the
only reason I know.
Back in those days, we raised lots of
apples and peaches and cherries, and
insects didn’t bother ‘em much. We’d
take the apples and the peaches and lay
‘em up on top of a building with a tin roof on
it and let ‘em dry. They would dry out, and
then we’d take ‘em and sack ‘em up and
hang the sacks up in the attic or the
smokehouse or somewhere. When winter
came we’d take ‘em and soak ‘em in
water to reconstitute ‘em and then boil ‘em
and cook ‘em and make fried pies with
apples or peaches or what have you. Or
we’d just eat ‘em stewed, either one. And

we had a lot of apples we’d keep over and
eat fresh apples up until it got so cold it’d
freeze ‘em. We didn’t have a good cellar
to keep ‘em in. Some people had good dry
cellars and they’d keep ‘em on up to
February.

Cash crops

The only crop that we really had when I
was little growing up was corn. We raised
the corn and we took the hogs and turned
the hogs in the corn and let them knock it
down and eat the corn off the ground and get
fat. Those that got big enough we’d have a
truck come, I don’t know, I guess when the
corn and stuff ran out, put ‘em on this truck
and take ‘em to Nashville. The ones that
weren’t big enough we’d run them over til
next year. There was a joke told about a
man who had a bunch of hogs and he said he
had enough hogs to sell that fall and to kill
and have enough meat to last him a year and
said he had enough shoats coming on to take
care of next year and he had enough pigs
coming on to take care of next year and said
after that he didn’t know what he was gonna
do.
We’d take this hog check that we’d get
once a year. My daddy had recently bought
a little 70 acre farm and finally got it paid for
and daddy bought about 50 acres in another
place and he paid everything that he made
on that place every year. The Depression
was coming on then, and all of his year’s
work would go to pay on the farm and the

farm was worth about what was owed on it.
And another year the same deal, it was going
down, down, down. The hog price was going
down, down, down.
We owed one of daddy’s cousins, I forget
whether his name was Sy Jenkins or Sy
Young. We’d go pay him once a year, and
we’d pay him $700 and that was all the
money we could get together. We milked
cows and raised chickens to make enough to
buy the groceries that we had to have. And
all this hog money went to him. He wouldn’t
take anything but cash, he wouldn’t take a
check, though he and daddy were kin people
and my daddy had as good a reputation as
anybody did. But he had to go to Lebanon
and get those hog checks converted into
cash and then had to drive or ride up to see
the old man and pay him that $700.
He had a great big old house and he had
a dog in the house, and great big old bull
dogs, and the doors chained. He had money,
but he was ornery. I never did know why he
was ornery and so hard until many years
later. I knew he didn’t have any children, but
I found out later that they had four children
and they all died before they were ten days
old. I often wondered if that hadn’t
contributed to him being so hard and mean. I
don’t know whether it did or didn’t.

But we weren’t doing any good, and my
daddy decided he had to do something else,
other than this hog business. Now, we did
raise some wheat, but normally just enough
wheat to make our flour and swap some of it
for meal and some of it for chicken feed, but

we never did sell any wheat that I recall.
Might have sold a little.
So, Daddy thought about raising sweet
potatoes, he thought about raising cotton, he
thought about raising peanuts, he thought
about raising soy beans and finally for some
reason, for a cash crop, he would try
tobacco. None of us had ever seen tobacco
stalk around there then. There was a man
that went to church with us about six miles
from us. We were three miles one side and
he was three miles the other side. He’d
been raisin’ tobacco a little. He was my
mother’s first cousin, I guess, they were
some kinda kin anyway. And Daddy went to
talk to him and we decided we’d raise
tobacco.
Back then you had to pile up big brush
piles and burn ‘em to kill all the seed in the
ground. And then you had to break up those
ashes in the ground and then you seed in
that and raise your own plants, and set ‘em
out.
We raised an acre of tobacco that year.
We put it on the best ground we had and put
the most cow fertilizer on it we had and grew
it on richest spot there was on the farm. It
made a fine crop and we carried that stuff to
Gallatin, which was about 25 miles from our
home. No, the first year he hired somebody
to carry it, on a truck. They brought it back,
and it had brought four hundred and thirty
somethin’ dollars. There had never been
that much money in our house at one time
ever. And he took that check from the
tobacco barn and put it up on the mantle
over the fireplace and let that check set up
there where we could look at it and see.

Well, the next year Uncle Ben, he decided
he’d raise tobacco. We had an acre and he
and Robert put out 5 acres, but my daddy he
never would expand that big. That year the
trucks were gonna charge too much to carry
it to Gallatin, so they got wagons and teams
and loaded the tobacco on those wagons
and took old quilts and tied over it and tied it
down, ‘cause it was rainin’ and they drove
that 25 miles. They left about 4 o’clock in
the morning and they got there about 8
o’clock that night. They slept on the
tobacco floor that night in what they call the
bull pen. It was just a room, there was stove
in it and benches around and people could sit
there and sleep and this that and the other.
And the next morning they got up and drove
back home.
I don’t know when it sold, it didn’t sell
then, but ‘bout a week or so later. And we
went in a car when it sold. So we began
coming out of the kinks a little bit then. It was
pretty hard for me to be against tobacco. I
would have never gone to college if it hadn’t
been for tobacco. I don’t guess Virginia
would have either.
I remember one story about it when we
were raising it. We had what they called
protracted meetings. Protracted means
going on a long time at church. And then
they’d usually have church in the morning or
the afternoon one and again that night. The
preacher that we had that time, he was
against tobacco and he preached several
times about how nasty chewing tobacco was
and how bad on you it might be, smokin, we
didn’t know. Anyway he was against it.

I remember we were down at my
grandmother’s one afternoon after dinner.
The preacher always stayed with my
grandmother. We were sitting out there
under the shade tree. And Uncle Ben said
“Well Brother ????, I don’t guess we’ll be
able to pay you for holdin’ this meeting.”
And the preacher wanted to know why.
Uncle Ben said “Well, the only money that
we have comes from raising tobacco. All the
people round here raise tobacco,” and said
“That’s our cash crop. You against tobacco
so, we just don’t feel like you want the
money.” He didn’t preach about tobacco
anymore.

Uncle Ben used to set out there under the
shade tree in a swing with that sharp knife
and a cedar stick and he had a lot of ‘em,
and he’d whittle and whittle and whittle,
shavings would pile up all around him.
People riding up and down all around the
road would stop and say “Ben, what in the
world you doing?” “Cuttin’ timber.” That
was the stock answer that he gave him. And
that tree was right beside my
grandmother’s house where Uncle Ben and
daddy were raised. And that’s where the
mule story came in.

The ghostly encounter

Daddy had gone somewhere, I don’t
know where to see a girl somewhere I guess.
I don’t know where he’d gone. But it was
along in August, September. Moon was full.
And he was coming back home and it was
getting late and there was a fence row that

had grown up on one side of the road. And it
was on the east side, ‘cause he was looking
up at the moon, and when he looked up he
saw something white floatin on top of that
fence row. Well, it scared him, he didn’t
know what it was. So, he decided that he’d
kick his horse up and move a little faster on
down the road. Well this thing on top of the
fence row, it moved up faster, too and kept
right up with him. And he thought, well, I’ll
slow down and see what happens. So he
slowed down and this ball of a thing up on
top of the fence row it continued to slow
down and go right along with him. And he
decided well I’m gonna get home, so he
kicked his horse and kicked off and here that
thing was floatin’ on top of the fence row
right along beside him. Finally, the fence row
ran out and an old grey mule trotted out. And
with its head throwed up in the air it was just
the right height for that fence row to make it
look like there was something floatin’ on top
of it. And that’s the story of the old mule.

School days

I didn’t go to school the first six weeks or
three months or whatever it was. I didn’t go
‘til after Christmas, and I rode with a
neighbor in a little buggy pulled by a pony.
And we did that that year, and the next year
they bought me a great big Indian pony and I
rode that thing to school, Old Dan, for ten
years.
The first day at school, I go bouncing in
and Clyde Cooksey met me, he was sort of a

bully. He wanted to know if I had any chalk,
and I told him, I didn’t really know what chalk
was. I said Naw, I didn't have any chalk. He
said “Well, you can’t go to school if don’t
have any chalk.” He said “You’ve got to
have chalk if you want to write on the
blackboard and you’ve got to write on the
blackboard.”
He said “I’ve got chalk, what’ll you
trade me for it?” And I didn’t have anything,
but some nice new marbles, and I showed
him them and he said “Well, I give you a
piece of chalk for every marble you have.”
And so then I get in the room and there’s
chalk all over the blackboards, everywhere.
And that was the first time I remember bein’
lied to and suckered.
I never was particularly fond of him. But
he was a couple of years older than I was
and a lot bigger than I was and I never did
like him. And I don’t know… we got in a fight
one time and for some reason he had rings
on his fingers that were bands that you put
around chickens’ legs, different colors so
that you could identify ‘em.
Well, we were fightin’ and he had those
rings on and he was literally beatin’ me
black and blue. I got a hold of his head of
hair in one hand, or both hands, I don’t
remember which and I held on to that hair, so
long and so hard that I pulled a great big
handful of it out of his head. The last time I
saw him he still had a bald spot in his head,
because that hair never did come back. My
face got well.
I went all the time to Tucker’s Cross
Roads to school, except one year from
Christmas ‘til school was out at May one

year. At Christmas time one year, Tucker’s
Cross Roads school burnt to the ground, and
we had to make arrangements to go other
places. On the back side of our place was a
little one room school house with one
teacher, about twenty students, I guess, so
they put me to school over there from
Christmas til school was out. And I think they
sent Virginia there one year, too, maybe.
The teacher would start off with the first
grade and teach them a while, then the
second, she had a long bench up front,
she’d move whatever grade she was
teaching up front. The rest of us would sit in
the back and study or listen or do something.
I don’t know what. But it wadn’t too bad, I
learned about as much there as I did
anywhere else. And I went to school, for
eighth grade, the first three grades had a
teacher and the second three grades had a
teacher, and the seventh and eighth grade
had a teacher, and then you went to high
school.
We had a two-year high school, we had
fifteen students. Eight were freshman and
seven were sophomores. And they taught
seven subjects, taught Latin, Algebra, and
English. And then that was to each group.
Then together, for all fifteen they taught
health one year and civics the next year.
They had one teacher for the whole high
school. He wasn’t a very good teacher and
we weren’t very good students.
But, we had a library, ‘bout the size a
broom closet that had a few books in it
inlcudin’ Encyclopaedia Britannica, and I
never heard of an encyclopaedia in my life.
But I saw ‘em in that room and I knew I

wasn’t doin’ in good in the classes in there
and I asked the teacher if I could go in there
and read the encyclopaedias. And he let me
do that, and I read lots of different things.
And one of the things that I read was about
Yosemite Valley in California and it showed a
picture of that waterfall and that rock called
Captain something or another, It was my
fantasy dream that someday I might go
there, never dreamin’ that I would. And then
one day I did get a chance, and I did go and I
did see. That was sorta the beginning of my
rambling and travelling, so you never know
what little thing, how early in life may have
something to do with other things in the
future.

Teenage driving

People were talking about the police being
so cruel and being afraid of police and not
trustin’ ‘em and this that and the other and
I said that I had an incident that happened
that changed my attitude towards police
when I was a little boy. I really didn’t know
anything about police one way or another,
‘cause out in the country we didn’t even
have a constable. We had a Sheriff that
would get out there occasionally in case of
murder or rape or something like that. But I
didn’t know anything about the police.
In the city of Lebanon that a city police
department with three, four, five policemen, I
don’t know how many. I knew that they
could arrest you and I knew that you had to
do whatever they said and this that and the
other. One night I had my mother and
daddy’s car borrowed and went to a little

restaurant to get a sandwich or whatever.
When I backed out, someone had parked
beside me and I scratched their fender. They
were people from New York or New Jersey
one, I have forgotten which, and they
screamed and yelled, made such a racket
you never heard in your life about how bad
their car was damaged.
Somebody was there and said well, I think
if I remember correctly they were wanting
me to pay ‘em for the damage to their car,
and somebody, I don’t know who, said
“Let’s go get the police and see what they
say.” There was always an old man walking
around the square and he was fairly close
and he came over there and looked at it and
he looked around. He talked to the people
who were still screaming and yelling. He told
them to calm down and let him look at it. He
got his flashlight out and looked around and
he said “When you people pulled in here, you
crossed the yellow line. You didn’t park in
the lines like you were supposed to. You
were illegally parked.” He said “Son, you
want to bring any charges to them? Any
damage to your car?” I said “No Sir, no Sir.
I don’t want to do a thing.”
They calmed down cool, ‘cause they saw
that the law wasn’t on their side. and they
took off and left. So I was expecting all kinds
of trouble and having to tell my daddy what
had happened. I didn’t know what was
going to happen. I became a pretty good
friend of this old policeman that took care of
the situation in my favor, I thought. So I’ve
always had maybe a little different attitude to
police than a lot of people have.

Chapter 3, College days

Uncle Ben didn’t want me to go to
college. And he had a pretty good sized
farm, it’s where his son lives now. But he
had thirteen acres across the creek and he
told me that if I wouldn’t go to college, he’d
give me that thirteen acres to start a farm
with and that I’d be better off farming than I
would going to college. He mighta been
right, I don’t know. But anyway that wasn’t
what I wanted, and my mother and daddy did
neither. So I managed to go to college.
My mother and daddy didn’t want me to
farm, because they had such a rough go of it.
They wanted me to do something else, I
don’t know if they didn’t think I could. I
don’t know what they thought. But
anyway... and I wanted to go to college, too.
I went over to Murfreesboro to try to get a
football scholarship. I played football in high
school. I wasn’t very good, but I didn’t
know I wasn’t. But anyway the boy I went
with, that Murfreesboro did want decided he
wasn’t gonna go, so they had no more
interest in me.
I had taken agriculture in high school, and
the agriculture agent came by and he and my
daddy were talking about college and said
that if was gonna go to school I was just as
well to go to the best one. My daddy wanted
to know what that was, and he said the
University of Tennessee. I don’t think either
one of us had heard of the University of
Tennessee at that particular time. So I went
on up there, the only thing is I didn’t have
any money. I think I had saved thirty dollars

from a black sheep that was mine. I got the
wool and I got the lambs. I accumulated
thirty dollars. And I had a pony that I had
ridden to school for a long, long time, and I
sold him for thirty dollars. That made sixty.
And I reckon my mother and daddy gave me
forty. Anyway I headed to UT with a hundred
dollars, that had to be room and board and
tuition, books, clothes, everything. I
hitchhiked up there. I hitchhiked home at
Thanksgiving and I hitchhiked back home at
Christmas.
I had a hundred dollars when I started to
college the first year. And that was to pay
my tuition, my books, my room and board
and everything else. Well, I got a job firing
furnaces to get a place to stay free2. I got a
job workin’ in a greasy spoon, a restaurant,
to get some meals. And I got a job working
out at the farm for twenty-five or thirty cents
and hour, I’ve forgotten which. It was a
National Youth Act, one of Roosevelt’s
government programs. And I just barely
made it through, and came home that
quarter and had no money at all. And no way
of getting any, ‘cause I’d sold my pony and
sheep and things I had to get the first
hundred dollars together. I didn’t have
anything else left. And I didn’t know how

2
I believe this to be the large brick and stone
house on Laurel Avenue that was later made
into apartments. When I was at UT, it was a
sought after, but expensive place. There
was a large lawn and one of the tenants
planted all the borders beautifully and
ocasionally gave me some cuttings, including
some stripey canna that I coveted.

much my daddy could or couldn’t have given
me. I don’t think he could have given me a
hundred dollars.
But he and Uncle Ben talked and Uncle
Ben said “Looks like he’s gonna go. So
here’s fifty dollars Neal, for him to go next
quarter.” I reckon my daddy had fifty dollars,
I don’t know, anyway. I just went a quarter
at a time. Just went a quarter at a time. But
then my daddy started working on the
tobacco floor in Gallatin. Five dollars a day,
big money. And he stayed over there, raised
tobacco in the summer time. Eventually
Virginia got in college, I was out then and he
and mother moved to Gallatin and they both
lived over there. And he worked on the
tobacco floors for a long, long time. He got
along real well with the man that owned the
tobacco warehouse. And when he and
mother got to living over there, instead of
staying on the tobacco floor he rode the
countryside asking people to bring their
tobacco to John Hancock’s warehouse to
let them sell it. He did that for a long time.
Then he began raising lespedeza which was
a new crop for farmers in our area then. And
seed were high for a while. I know one
summer, I took the mower and mules and cut
around the ditches in the corners and did this
that and the other and I’d make five dollars a
day cutting lespedeza seed. After they’d
already cut the main crop.
I got a job then working at a dairy in East
Tennessee in the summer. For room and
board and fifty dollars a month, I don’t know
what. Then school started, I got room and
board, but no pay. But I didn’t have to work
as much. That was at the East Tennessee

Tuberculosis hospital, I believe you went
through Fountain City, and the man that owns
Security Feed Mills lived across from the
hospital. I’m pretty sure you went through
Fountain City to get out there.
They carried me to meet a bus, because
they had employees they had to pick up, it
was a big hospital, on the shift changes. And
then I had to get back at a certain time to
meet the bus to get carried back out to the
farm. I got tired of that, though ‘cause you
never could get enough sleep. Or I couldn’t,
‘cause you had to milk three times a day.
And you never could... It just didn’t work
out. The longest period that you had off was
between the second milking and the final
milking and that was when supper was
served. And if you didn’t get up you didn’t
get any supper, you got awful hungry. So I
got a job working in the cafeteria over at the
University, makin’ 25 cents an hour, I
believe. And a big discount on the food that
we ate, plus this that and the other that we
could pick up to eat that other people didn’t
eat.

College dances

When I first went to the University of
Tennessee, I didn’t know how to dance and
they had mixers where they had boys and
girls would come and learn to dance and
learn to meet each other. Maybe I already
knew how to dance then, I don’t know. But
it was at the gymnasium – old gym – Alumni
Memorial Gym at the University of
Tennessee.

At that time nobody’d ever heard of air
conditioning and they had great big fans.3
There were lots of people there dancing.
Lots and lots of ‘em. There was a little short
girl, her name was Sadie something, I’ve
forgotten what, from Opaloosa, Louisiana. I
was dancin’ with her, and of course I chew
mints all the time now, but back then I don’t
think they had mints and I chewed gum all the
time. It was hot and I danced over and got in
front of one of those fans so we could cool
off. She was a little short girl and her head
came up just about under my chin and I was
a-chewin’ away on the gum and danced
over there to that fan and her hair blew up in
my mouth. It got tangled up in that chewing
gum and I didn’t know what in the world I
was gonna do.
I think I told you or some of ‘em later on
that I got so hot that the gum melted but
actually what I did, I started chewing with my
teeth and I chewed her hair in two that was
on the gum. I don’t know whether she ever
missed the hair or not. I don’t know
whether she ever figured it out or not. Sadie,
I’ve forgotten her last name. But that was a
hot night in more ways than one. It was. It
was.
I took tap dancing because I was having to
work when I was in college to make what

3
At the time I attended the University of
Tennessee, starting in 1988, Alumni Gym still
had no air conditioning. They still relied on
those giant, ancient fans to keep it
comfortable. I don’t doubt that those fans
were the same ones my grandfather
remembers.

money I could. Physical ed was required
then. For two or three years you did. I had
to take it. I knew absolutely nothing about
tap dancing. But this was the only class that
there was available during the only period of
time I had when I wadn’t working. So I
signed up for tap dancing. And I tried to tap,
but I never could tap. If you attended every
class, you got a C. And I attended every
class, and I got a C. But I still couldn’t tap
dance. I didn’t have any tap dancing shoes,
but I bought me some taps.
I didn’t have but one change of clothes,
one change of shoes, three or four shirts and
suits of underwear. I took ROTC and, had to
then, and they issued you olive drab woolen
uniforms and in real cold weather I wore
those. I scrambled through every which-a-
way. I sold programs at the football games,
basketball games. I just went to school and
worked. The extra-curricular activities; I
didn’t know existed. But I made it and it in
the meantime my daddy started the tobacco
business and that brought a little more
income in, and doing other things brought a
little more in. I got a little better jobs; making
a little more money. Barely got by, but I got
through. When I got through why I didn’t
know what I wanted to do.

Career planning

Some people told me “You better put an
application in, you’ll be graduating before
you know it.” So I applied to get a job
teaching vocational agriculture. And I’d
never heard about Farm Security
Administration, but somebody told me about

that, so I applied for that, too. And I heard
from the Vo-Ag people first, and they called
and said I had a place up in West Virginia. So
I went up there and taught up there a year.
Good place, good country, good people.
Could have been a bad deal, but I didn’t
know. There’s little very good, most of it is
very bad.

Chapter 4, Early working life

Teaching school

My degree was in Agricultural Education. I
was qualified to teach agriculture, English,
biology, and I don’t know, something else,
Economics I believe. And I got a lifetime
certificate. I still have it. I still qualify to
teach, because at that time when you went
and got your teaching certificate it was for
life. You didn’t have to get it renewed or
anything, now you have to get it renewed
every so often. But I never did teach but for
one year. I didn’t like teaching.
Well, I did like teaching. I liked to teach real
smart students and I liked to teach real dumb
students and I liked to teach mediocre
students, but you stir ‘em all up in the same
class... That just didn’t suit me.
I taught in Ronceverte, West Virginia. I
didn’t even know where West Virginia was. I
didn’t know what I was gonna do when I got
through college. I applied for teaching jobs
anywhere I could get one, and I applied to the
government to work for the Farm Security
Administration. Well, they called and said
they wanted me over at Henderson,
Kentucky. I said OK, suits me, I’m on way. I
didn’t know where Henderson, Kentucky
was either, it’s right close to Paducah on the
Mississippi River.
But before I left they told me they don’t
want you, they’ve found an experienced
teacher, and in a day or two they said they
want you in Ronceverte, West Virginia. OK. I

go to Ronceverte, West Virginia. And that
could have been rough, ‘cause boy there
are some rough places in West Virginia. But
Ronceverte’s on the Greenbrier River, and
it’s in a bluegrass area, real good farm area
and real nice people in Ronceverte. It’s
close to White Sulphur Springs. I enjoyed
teaching there, but it was a long way from
home. Especially travelling in a little old 1932
V8 Ford car.
I bought that car from Puckett Motor
Company in Alexandria, Tennessee. My
daddy let me borrow the money to pay for it
and I paid him back out of checks where I
taught school.

Farm Security Administration

So, I’d been up there about a year, and
this Farm Security Administration that I’d
applied to earlier, I got a letter from them
saying that they had an opening in Nashville.
And if I was interested to come interview, so
when I was home Christmas I did. I told
‘em that I’d have to give notice – I believe
three months at school or something like
that. But I would start, and I started in March
I believe.
I was working in Nashville with a man
who’d been there a long time. He had
Davidson County and Williamson County
both, where Franklin is. And the intention
was that they would split. He would have
Davidson County only and I would move to
Franklin and have Williamson County only.
Well, I don’t know, that didn’t work out
some way or another and they said “Well,
they’re gonna put another man on down in

Lawrence County. You want to go to
Lawrence County?” And I didn’t know
where Lawrence County was. I never had
been down in this part of the country. I knew
Loretto was in Lawrence County, ‘cause
we’d played them in basketball in a
tournament one time and that’s all I knew
about Lawrence County.
I told ‘em “Yeah, I’d sooner go to
Lawrence County as not.” And they said
“Well now you don’t have to go,” And that
sorta threw up a flag, why they said that, but
I said “I don’t care, doesn’t make any
difference to me.”
I’d as soon be there as anywhere else, so
I came down, came down through here,
Maury County, Williamson County, it all
looked good to me. I came up Rockdale Hill
and hit Lawrence County, and I knew why
they told me you don’t have to come down
here if you don’t want to. There wasn’t a
blade of green grass anywhere, there
weren’t any cows, there weren’t any
chickens, there weren’t any hogs. There
wasn’t anything but shacks, cotton stalks
and broom sage. That was absolutely all,
and I knew I was in a poor place then.
People were ridin’ in wagons and later on,
if the weather was fair, on Sunday they’d put
straight back chairs in those wagons and go
to church and go vistin’, and the people just
didn’t have much money at all. People then
in 1940 were still comin’ to town in wagons
pulled by mules. People would go to church
on Sunday with chairs sittin’ in the wagons.
And 64 Highway was blacktopped and 43
Highway was blacktopped and there was a
road from Leoma to Five Points blacktopped

and that was the only blacktopped roads in
Lawrence County. And it was a poor hard
place to live right then.
But it started getting’ better and
continuously has gotten better.
When we went out to work, and this was in
March and there’d been a terrible cold spell
that year, the roads were in terrible, terrible
shape, and we carried log chains and
boomers or stretchers to pull with and picks
and shovels and all sortsa kinda stuff in the
back of our car, because you could get stuck
goin’ down the roads. And if you went to a
farm early in the morning, and we moved
early then, we went to work at seven
o’clock, if you stayed too long, and the
ground thawed up, you might get stuck
before you got back to a chert road. In fact, I
have had that to happen. Sometimes you
had to dig out and chuck up with rocks under
the wheels and stuff to get out and
sometimes the people would hook up a team
and pull you out. Pretty rough stuff.
People had been accustomed to
borrowing about fifty dollars a year to make a
crop. [From the banks.] They would get a
man who sold mules to sell ‘em a team of
mules on the credit, and they never could pay
for ‘em, but the man that sold ‘em the
mules would say ‘That’s alright, you just
feed ‘em on, and if you can’t pay for ‘em
by spring, I’ll bring you another pair
around.’ And what he did, he constantly
brought unbroke mules for the people to
work, and then they worked ‘em a year,
made a crop, and they were broke, and he
took ‘em up then and brought ‘em another
pair of unbroke mules. So that was the way

that part of it worked. And then they
borrowed fifty dollars for their fertilizer,and
seed if they had to buy seed, and a stand of
lard, a little stuff to live on. A stand a lard
was literally because some people at some
time had absolutely nothing but grease gravy
to eat. And that was lard with flour stirred up
in it.
The Farm Security Administration knew
that they could never get ahead with that
kind of doin’s, so we had a rule that if we
were gonna loan them money, they had to
borrow money to buy a team of mules with,
or a horse, if they made a one-horse crop,
and they had to borrow enough money to buy
a hundred quarts of fruit jars for a hundred
quarts of food for each person. And they had
to buy a pressure cooker that at that time
cost fifteen dollars. And they wanted ‘em to
borrow enough money to fence in a garden.
They didn’t much want to do that, because
the law was that if you put something down
on a piece of property, you couldn’t take it
with you when you moved.
Most families moved every year, because
they’d think they’d do better if they moved
somewhere else another year. Which they
couldn’t, but they thought they could. But
they would borrow the money to get the
fence with, because they figured they could
tear it down -- maybe, and get away with it.
But then, they decided that they ought to
have screens on the windows to keep the
flies out. Well, they absolutely wouldn't
borrow for that. They would not take the loan
if you had to put money in for a screen.
‘Cause they knew that was lost. And we
just either had to give in to ‘em or turn the

loan down, one. Tellin’ people they ought to
buy screens to keep the flies out, wasn’t
doin’ any good at all.
The ladies, and a lot of ‘em did, had nice
white counterpanes, or at least nice white
sheets on top of the bed, I think they put
‘em on when they knew somebody was
comin’. I’m not sure about that, but
anyway they had this nice white sheet or
counterpane on top of the bed, and an ol’
chicken came in and got on top of the bed
and the chicken just ruined the counterpane
or the sheet. And it just dawned on me all of
a sudden ‘Hey, if we can’t sell ‘em the
screens to keep the flies out, maybe we can
sell it to ‘em to keep the chickens out.’ So
I told folks ‘Now, if y’all had screens up,
that old chicken couldn’t have got in here
and messed your bed up like that.’ And that
was the first time we made a loan to buy
screens. And it worked pretty well, most of
the time.
But now Lawrence County had a lot of
people that had moved here from Winston
County, Alabama. And Winston County was a
county that was strictly Republican. And
during the Civil War, they tried to secede
from Alabama, because Alabama went with
the Confederacy, and they didn’t want any
part of that. But then later on, with cotton
started up here, they thought it would be
better if they moved up here and a lot of
people from Winston County moved to
Lawrence County, Tennessee. And they
were Republicans when they came and their
descendants are nearly all still Republicans.
That’s the reason there are as many
Republicans as there are in Lawrence

County. In fact, close to a third of the people
are Republicans, and about a third are
Democrats, the other third are mugwamps,
or Independent or whatever you want to call
it.
We would also loan money to a man to buy
a farm with. I made about forty loans for
people to buy farms. When I came back from
the war, all those people that I loaned money
to buy farms, when I went in business traded
with me. I think I was prouder of that than I
was of anything. Every one of ‘em. And I
reckon they’re all dead now. The men are
all dead and there may be one or two women
living, I’m not sure. One died this year, and I
thought that was the last of ‘em but
somebody told me about another lady that
was still living, but all the men are dead. All
of ‘em paid for their farms. ‘Course the war
came along, land went up, everything went
up and times were booming. They paid their
loans off and some of ‘em thought they
never would pay ‘em off. They couldn’t
imagine that they’d ever make that much
money; and we couldn’t loan over 2,500
dollars. But they couldn’t ever see paying
that much off.
And you know practically, I didn’t realise
it, ‘cause I didn’t know whether people
were Republicans or Democrats, but
practically no Republicans would borrow.
They didn’t want nothing to do with them
Alphabet programs: FSA, Farm Security
Administration. A lot of ‘em didn’t want
anything to do with the AAA, Agricultural
Adjustment Act – that was the one where
they told you how many acres of stuff you
could raise and how many pounds of stuff

you could raise on those acres. If you
conformed, they paid you and if you didn’t
conform, well you had trouble getting cards
to sell your cotton.
When you went down the Rabbit Trail
Road, and turned to the left to go from
Bonnertown to Appleton, that land was
owned by the Crowders who were the
staunchest Republicans in the county, and I
don’t know if they came from Winston
County or not, I don’t think they did, but I
don’t know about that. And it was the
Wilsons, and the Yarboroughs and the
Crowders, and they were all three families
strong Republicans. And I never made a loan
from Bonnertown to Appleton, but I didn’t
understand why. I didn’t know the history
of the people and things, but in later years I
found out that the people who owned the
land, if they found out they were trying to get
a loan through the Farm Security
Adminstration, they’d tell ‘em they’d have
to move. They weren’t gonna have ‘em
farmin’ their land and fiddlin’ with one of
those government loans. And I got the first
inklin’ of that when I made a man a loan and
his check came in and I notified him it was
there, for him to come in and get his check.
And he came in and said he didn’t want that
check, he said to send it back. The reason
they had to come in on their checks was,
when we set up that they had to borrow for,
that they had to have at least one cow, two
hogs, fifty chickens, fruit jars, pressure
cooker, screens, this that and the other, they
wouldn’t use the money for what they
agreed to use it for when they borrowed.
They didn’t like it all being told what they had

to use the money for, so the money had to be
put in a joint bank account, and they couldn’t
spend the money unless they signed it and I
counter-signed it. And that’s the reason
they had to come in to get their checks to
deposit it in the joint account. But I didn’t
know it at the time, but there were some
merchants that would let ‘em write a check
for fruit jars or what not, but they would give
‘em something else instead.
When I first started work with Farm
Security, in fact as long as I worked for Farm
Security, men and women had to travel
together. There had to be a home supervisor
as well as a farm supervisor. The Home
Supervisor would plan with the women, how
to have better meals, and balanced meals,
assure ‘em that they were getting’ enough
money that they could have better things
than what they had had. Teach ‘em how to
can. I know a time or two, people would kill a
beef and we’d go out and cut the beef up
and show ‘em how to can it, and literally can
it. And with the county agent, we also taught
‘em how to make mattresses.
There was plenty of cotton in the county,
but people slept on old sorry mattresses,
straw ticks, everything else, with all the
cotton in the world. So we taught ‘em how
to make mattresses. And one of the beating-
est things that I ever got into, Mrs Graves
was the home supervisor, and we had a
client, Oliver Clayton and his wife. And I
know they ran the nastiest house, and were
nasty, just absolutely nasty. Now, that’s the
only way to describe it. ‘Course I guess
they was eat up with worms, sick and
everything else and couldn’t do any better.

Lot of little old children. She said ‘We’re
going out there today, and we’re gonna eat
with those people.” And I said “No way,
absolutely no way I’m gonna eat in Oliver
Clayton’s house”, and she said you come
on, and stay with me ‘til we get ready to eat,
and if you can’t then, we’ll leave. I believe
you’ll stay.”
So we went, she had a big pan, and boiled
water on the stove, poured soap suds in it,
scoured the old kitchen table down, dried it
off, spread newspaper on it. Well, I’ve
forgotten what she cooked, corn bread, for
sure, white beans, for sure, and I don’t know
what else. But she brought baskets with her,
and she brought napkins with her, and she
put these napkins in these baskets and put
the corn bread in that, and she boiled the
knives and forks and utensils and stuff. And
it was pretty sanitary lookin’. But she had
taught them something, actually she taught
me, too. But I remember that woman, Mrs
Clayton, I’ve forgotten what her first name
was if I ever knew.
At that time, people came to town on
Saturday, they’d come pretty early in the
morning. And they’d walk around and
around the square. Around and around the
square, and stop and look in the windows,
had a hard time findin’ a place that would let
you use the restroom. That’s the reason I
was so positive that restrooms ought to be
provided on the public square for people.
But they’d look in the windows. I remember
Mrs Graves, the home supervisor, askin’
Mrs Clayton ‘What do you look at, whenever
you walk around?” And there was a grocery
store over there in the corner where White

owns now (?) -- a Peppers fellow ran it, but it
wasn’t Peppers then. And she said “I stand
in that window and look at the cheese,” And
I thought that was the oddest thing that she
would be lookin’ at cheese, and I asked Mrs
Graves about that, I said “Why’s she
lookin’ at cheese?” And she’s said
“She’s absolutely protein starved. And
she’s lookin’ at that cheese and wantin’ it,
cause she’s so hungry for protein.”
‘Course that’s the reason we forced the
loan… they had to buy a cow.
The Farm Security Act was pretty good in
a lot of ways, but it wasn’t too long til the
war came along, and economic conditions
got better everywhere. And I guess it would
have worked out of it, some way or another.
Course it was a slow thing. It was a rare
thing that a German Catholic ever took a loan
from the Farm Security Administration, cause
they were good enough farmers and good
enough managers and smart enough and
resourceful enough, so that they made it
without having to get a loan from anybody for
anything. The Beuerleins and Niedergeses,
those people.

Buying up bad loans

The Farm Security Administration got the
idea, that to really help people they were
gonna have to get these debts off ‘em that
they owed, where they had to borrow money
from the bank. People were good and
honest and they meant to pay their debts,
wanted to pay their debts. But when the
depression came and the bottom fell out of

everything they just couldn’t pay their debts,
at all.
And a lot of people carried ‘em, Bert’s
daddy had a store up in Ethridge, and he
carried ‘em for a long time. And there were
lots of people that got in bad shape and
couldn’t pay what they owed. The Farm
Security Administration, the powers that be,
thought that it would be a good thing if those
people could get rid of those debts. So they
came up with the idea that they would loan
the man 2% of what he owed, if the person
that he owed would accept the 2% and write
the 98% off.
And they insisted that the supervisors in
the County go around and see the people
that they owed that money to and see if they
could buy the debts up. Well, I elected to go
see an old man Gladdish who was a ginner,
who had furnished cotton seed and fertilizer
to a lot of people and they just couldn’t pay
him. He was a pretty successful ginner
because he managed what money he had
well, pretty tight, pretty hard. So I go up to
see the old man, and he’s sittin in an old
rockin chair, like John F Kennedy sat in, only
it was a lot rougher and he was sittin’ there
and I went in. I told him what my name was
and who I was workin’ with and why I was
there.
And he didn’t say sit down or anything, so
I set down and I told him I was up there to
see if I could buy up the debt of some of our
clients owed him and wanted to pay him 2
cents on the dollar for the debt, that the
government would advance two cents on the
dollar if he’d write the rest of it off. He
never said a word. He was rockin’ in that

chair, and he kept on rockin’. And I told him
again, what I was up there for and what I
hoped to do. And he kept on rockin’, and he
never said anything. It seemed to me like I
was there for five hours, but it must have not
been over five minutes. And I got up and left
and he still didn’t say anything.
And he was a real gruff lookin’ old man.
And he’s the man that had the leather
pocket books made which were made out of
good leather, and they were good pocket
books and they lasted for years, but they had
a slogan printed on every one of them that
said “We ain’t mad at nobody.”
So the government kept on me to get
somebody to agree sell up some of those
debts. I saw this wasn’t gonna work worth
a dime, and I told ‘em I didn’t understand
the program. I said I wasn’t very successful
at getting’ anything done, and I wished they
come down and show me what and how to
do. They said ok, they’d be right down.
Two of the top bosses came down and they
told me to make an appointment with Mr Jim
Stribling who was the banker who owned the
biggest bank there was in Lawrence County,
lots of land, the Christian Home, the place
where they bought cross-ties for the
railroads. He was just into everything.
And I called Mr Stribling and told him that
two of the people from Farm Security wanted
to talk to him, when would be convenient. He
set a time. I called back and told them and
they said they’d be there. So we went up
there. I introduced them to Mr Stribling, they
exchanged pleasantries for a little while. And
then they said “Mr Stribling, what we’re
here for is about this business of buyin’ up

these debts.” And he was a pretty
diplomatic old man, and pretty smooth. He
said “Have you boys ever heard of my
cousin, TS Stribling who lives over at Clifton,
who’s written a book about ‘My cousin
Jim’. And they said, No Sir, they hadn’t
heard of that. ‘Well he won a prize for
literature with that story. It’s runnin in the
Saturday Evening Post now, serially. I have
some copies laying up here on my filing
cabinet. Would y’all like to have a copy?”
And they said ‘Sure, we would Mr Stribling,
we’d be glad to read it.’ So he reached up
there and got ‘em a copy, gave it to ‘em
and said “Why boys, you come back to see
me some time.” And that was the end of
that. And they didn’t say anymore to me
about trying to buy these debts. And I didn’t
bring it up anymore.

The Farm Security Act

I didn’t know it at the time, but the guy
that really wrote the Farm Security Act was
named Rexford Guy Tugwell. And Mr.
Rexford Guy Tugwell was the appointed
Governor of Puerto Rico when Roosevelt was
runnin’ for president. And he was supposed
to be a friend of Mrs Roosevelt, and he was
supposed, if he wasn’t a communist, to have
very strong communist leanings. Now
whether that’s true or not true, I don’t
know, but he did have very liberal and far-
advanced thoughts. That’s for sure.
Course at that time I was a pretty strong
supporter of Mr Roosevelt, ‘cause I knew
what the farmers had gone through and what
their plight was and how little they had. He

was the only person of national stature that I
had ever heard of that had any kind of a
program that was supposed to be of benefit
to farm people.
Some of that stuff was declared
unconstitutional. The National Recovery Act
was then, the NRA was declared
unconstitutional. They had to change some
of the other programs to change ‘em from
being unconstitutional. But there’s always
been a tendency and pushin’ for one world,
for the haves to do for the have-nots. The
Have-nots always seem to think that they
deserve more and the Haves seem to think
it’s not their job to provide any more. I
don’t know.

The Bloody Bucket

When asked about the Bloody Bucket

Well, the Bloody Bucket, that was in
Lawrence County, it was down there on
Buffalo Road, George Stevens owned the
land it was on. And it was a very rough night
club. When I came to Lawrence County, they
were just eliminatin’ the sale of beer in the
county. And I assume that they were or they
had sold beer in the Bloody Bucket, anyway
they fought a lot. There were a lot of fights
and people got drunk, and I’m not positive
that somebody didn’t get killed in the Bloody
Bucket, but they did in some of the beer
joints around. And it was just a place that
had a bad name is all I know.

IK: Did you go in there?

BP: No. I didn’t cull many places, but I
culled that one.

Chapter 5: Early Married Life

I did that work [for the Farm Security
Administration] and I met Tut [Pauline
Bottoms] along in April.
Later on I took tennis. I had never played
tennis, but I learned to play tennis fairly well.
That’s where I met Tut, on the tennis courts
in the city of Lawrenceburg. Virginia
Freemon Lindsey that was working for me
had a tennis court and somehow or another
she found out that I played tennis and she
said she wanted Tut and I to come down and
play with some of her friends and that’s
where I met Tut, there on the tennis court.
Tennis court’s grown up in kudzu now.
Virginia’s dead and Tut’s dead. Ed Lindsey
that married Virginia is still living. He was a
pretty good tennis player. He wasn’t as
good as he thought he was.
And we decided to get married along in
the Fall, sometime or another.

The wedding

Well, we had our wedding at the
Downtown Church of Christ. And we had
Tut’s sister and one of her friends on the
lady’s side, and we had two men that we
both knew, one of ‘em I went to school with
at UT. The other one was a friend of Tiny’s,
and we were married there at the Downtown
Church of Christ. Six of us.
Her parents, well, they didn’t want to
come. My parents didn’t either. You didn’t
have any money to decorate a church or
have a wedding much. I don’t know why,

maybe Tut didn’t want ‘em to come. Tiny4
wasn’t there, either. I don’t know why.
Alvin probably wouldn’t come. And Tut
wouldn’t have wanted Tiny to be there by
herself, I don’t know. I didn’t know Alvin
very well then. Weddings were different
then. And all of the people that were at the
wedding except me are dead.
Tut wanted Brother Coffman5 to marry us.
His daughter had been a real good friend of
hers and he had been a Church of Christ
preacher for years and he taught out here at
the high school for years. She knew that he
wouldn’t marry people until he talked to
them before he married ‘em. So we went
down to his house. ‘Course she knew him
and his wife and his daughter. She was as
unconcerned as she could be. But I didn’t
know him, I don’t know that I’d ever met
the man or not. But I remember him pullin’
the glasses down on the end of his nose,
“Boy, you ever been married before?” If I
had, he wouldn’t have married us. He
wouldn’t marry anybody who’d married
before.

A brief stint in Waverley

Hadn’t been here long before I married
Tut and they were gonna transfer me to
Waverley, Tennessee. And so OK, didn’t

4
Tiny was Nadine Bottoms Brown and Alvin
Brown was her husband. Tiny was Tut’s
closest sister in age.
5
E.O. Coffman for whom the middle school
my brother and I attended (briefly) was
named.

make any difference to me, but I later found
out that it did make some difference to Tut,
but she was willing to go. So we went to
Waverley, Tennessee. They were gonna fix
us an apartment over there and the place
where I’d been living over there, renting.
But before they got that done the man that
was in Lawrenceburg, Lawrence County, he
got a job with TVA and was leaving and they
wanted to know if I wanted to come back to
Lawrenceburg. And yeah, it suits me, and
boy Tut, she was all for it. She wanted back.
We came back, and I worked in Lawrence
County for the next three years making loans
to very, very, very poor people.
So I don’t guess we stayed over there
after we were married, I don’t guess we
stayed a month. I’m pretty sure we didn’t,
cause we married the 20th of November. I
think we came back sometime in December
and rented a little old three room house that
was brand new, had a floor in it, pretty floor,
hard wood – no it wasn’t – it was pine. But
it finished out real pretty, no subfloor,
nothing, just pine on the sills or whatever it
was. And it had clapboard on the outside
and pine on the wall on the inside and no
insulation between the walls at all, and no
insulation overhead. We had a Cole Airtight
wood heater in the living room. To have hot
water you had a little old coal fired stove the
size of a washtub sitting in the kitchen and
you had to have a fire in that. In the bedroom
we had an electric heater. A three room
apartment with a Cole Airtight in the living
room, a coal stove in the kitchen and an
electric heater in the bedroom. And it still
wasn’t too hot.

I stayed with the Farm Security
Administration until I was drafted into the
Army. I was called up twice and I was
deferred twice because I was working with
these poor farmers and they needed all the
food production they could possibly get. So I
was in a deferred basis. That was about a
year I guess I was deferred. And then I
decided everybody was gone but me and
people were looking at me and wondering
why I was still here. It was just time to go.

Chapter 6: The War

Selection and enlistment

To get a little symmetry, I guess you’d
say, to the thing, I was actually drafted in
1943. In the late Fall I had been called by the
draft board twice before but was deferred
because I was making loans to farm people
and all the food production that farmers
could produce was needed for the army. So I
was deferred these two times. When I got
the third call I elected not to ask for another
deferment. Because by that time there were
very few young people my age left and
people were beginning to look at me and
wonder “What’s he here for? What’s the
matter with him?” And I just sorta thought
like “Everybody else has gone, so it’s my
time to go, too.”
So I reported to the draft board, the last of
October, first of November and went to Fort
Oglethorpe which was just across the line in
Georgia, near Chattanooga. There’s where
I was sworn in and came back home for a
while, a short while. Then I was called back
to Fort Oglethorpe and stayed there just a
short time and caught a bus and went to
Camp Blandon in Florida, which was near
Jacksonville, Florida.
I was assigned to the infantry and in going
through the processing to get into to where
you were going to be assigned they asked
questions about everything that you had ever
done in your life. And one of the things that I
had done was work in the cafeteria at the
University of Tennessee as a bus boy, more

or less, tearing down and setting up steam
tables. After I got to Camp Blandon one day
they came by and said “Have your gear out
at five o’clock in the morning and you’re
gonna be transferred.” Where I didn’t
know, but I was there and was taken to a
different place for training and this was cook
and baker school. So they trained us to be
cooks and to be riflemen both. Bout half the
time on one and half the time on the other.

Shipping out

After we finally got through with this basic
training which I think was about six or eight
weeks we got to come home for a short time
and then we were assigned to go to a camp
on the east coast to get shipped overseas.
And I got there on June 6 which was D-Day
and unbeknownst to any of us that it was D-
Day for some reason we were told to get on
a train we were gonna be transferred out
west. Why we didn’t know. We later found
out that there weren’t any ships to take us
across because they were all being used on
the D-Day invasion.
They transferred us to a Camp in
Mississippi. I can’t think of the name of it
offhand. I guess it was Camp Van Dorn.
There were lots of big mosquitoes there – I
remember that. Just before I was to get
shipped overseas they examined us
physically and they found out that I had one
less than the number of teeth that I was
supposed to have, so while I was on the East
coast they made me a partial bridge, but I
was shipped to Van Dorn, before they got my
partial bridge to me. So I go to Van Dorn and
they examine me again and the bridge
doesn’t come so they fuddle around with me
and make another bridge and ship it to the
East coast when we go back the second
time and neither one of the bridges caught
up with me then. I thought I was going to
spend the war waiting for a bridge. But finally
they shipped us out to go to England and this
was in August or September I guess it was.

We went on the Mauritania, which was a
very large ship. I believe they said it had
twenty thousand people on it. We were
crammed in just like sardines. We had to
take about 150 pounds of gear with us
including our rifle and the bandalier,
ammunition, overcoat, extra pair of shoes,
shelter half, tent pegs, mess kits, and a
whole bunch of stuff. All together it weighed
about 150 pounds. You could barely carry it.
And we were assigned to a place and got
very unhappy with the room that we had.
They assured us that they were going to give
us more room in a little while, but they
didn’t, that’s where we stayed. We ate
twice a day on the ship going over.
[The ship] was run by the British and
somewhere out in the ocean we saw a bunch
of whales or porpoises or some kinda big fish
and everybody started running to one side of
the ship and the blare came over the address
system. “Now hear this, now hear this. Get
back on other side of the ship.” Everybody
had run to one side of the ship and we were
about to capsize the ship, they thought.
Maybe we were, I don’t know.
We didn’t have any escort. This was a
pretty fast ship and it zig zagged every seven
minutes. They said it took something over
seven minutes for the Germans to site their
submarine torpedoes on a ship so we zig-
zagged all across the ocean to the left and
the right every seven minutes. I think it took
us about a week or ten days to get to
Southampton, England.

Reassignment

We got there one night and they unloaded
us and walked us through the town in the
pitch dark ‘cause there were no lights in
England because they were still being
bombed then. And we went somewhere and
our place that we were gonna stay were
great big old tents that would sleep about 12
people to the tent. And they had straw piled
on the ground and mattresses stuffed full of
straw and that’s where and what we slept
on.
Well, we were supposed to still be cooks
then, but they decided they’d take all the
cooks and bakers and buglers and clerk
typists and support people of that various
kind and retrain us as infantrymen again. So
we trained in England for I guess about six
weeks, I don’t know how long. Then they
said we were infantry men again, no more
cookin’. So were then assigned to go to
France and we were placed in what’s called
a replacement depot.
I didn’t know what that meant at the time,
but the war was winding down and there had
been – I guess – millions of people killed,
wounded, captured and things happened to
them and all the companies were way under
strength. They put as all in these
replacement depots and signed us out to the
companies that were in the worst shape. All
they really wanted was just warm bodies to
fill up the gaps and that’s what we were. So
we stayed in these replacement depots for a
while, a pretty good while I don’t know how
long. And then they said they were going to
assign us to a company.
So they came in and moved us up to some
town – I remember we went by St Die which

had just been fought over a time before and
they told us that we were going to wait in this
particular town until the General came and he
was going to talk to us before we went to the
front. Well, we waited and waited and waited
and waited and waited and waited stood out
in the rain. Stood there so long, some of
‘em fell out. But finally the General came
and I don’t know what he said, but I reckon
he said “Fight hard,” I don’t know what
else, but they loaded us in trucks, about 10 or
12 people to a small truck and took ‘em up
to the Vosges mountains with us. It was dark
then and it was really dark when we got
there. ‘Course we rode three or four or five
hours.

Arriving at the front

They unloaded us from those trucks and a
sergeant came out with a blanket over his
head and a flashlight and called the roll. How
he knew who was going to be there, I don’t
know, but he did. And didn’t take him long
to call the roll and he said “OK we’ll see
you all in society in the morning.” And we
said “Sergeant where we gonna sleep
tonight?” and he said “I don’t care where
you sleep. I’m going to get in my hole.”
And he took off and we stood out in the
middle of the woods with the rain pouring
down and the mud and the snow and the
slush all around us and we didn’t know what
to do, but another old boy and I each had a
shelter half and we laid one of ‘em down
and pulled the other one over us. I reckon
we’d been through so much that we slept
there.

No Little Thing Bill Powell Oral History

No Little Thing Bill Powell Oral History

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