My Family: Chapter 12

Two things happened once we moved out of Macbeth, Sonny got the mumps and Grandma Francis came to live with us again. Mom and Grandma Francis put Sonny in a room by himself and made it real dark. For two weeks they didn't let him come out of that room, they didn't want the mumps to fall on him, and they wanted him to be able to have children when he grew up. This meant the seven of us shared the same bedroom.

Bonnie age 3 Sonny 13 Ronnie age 5

I forgot to tell you the most important thing, I was forever getting into trouble and getting a beating. I always had to go and get three switches for Dad to braid together. He would leave cut marks on my legs and back. These rules saw to it that I got a beating everyday with a switch: cussing (which also got my mouth washed out with soap), don't play on railroad tracks, don't repeat what you hear adults say, come home when you hear your dad whistle, and mind your mother. I just couldn't help myself. And I never saw the two boys get a hit at all. The other kids could hear me scream all over the hollow because when I got whipped I didn't stand still. I crawled under anything and ran behind furniture - wore Dad out beating me. Mom always cried, first she would nag Dad to beat us then cry because he beat us too hard.

Dad's beating weren't the only reason I had bruises. When I was in third grade a bad storm blew up with a very strong wind. It was so bad that the side of the wall in our schoolroom caved-in on top us. My seat was next to the wall and there was a boy who sat in the next row of seats across from me who, when the wall began to cave-in, hollered he'd save me. He knocked me out of my chair, onto the floor, and was lying on top of me. I screamed for him to get off, but he kept saying he'd save me. The teacher finally had to pull him off, which was my most embarrassing moment. No one got hurt as the wall was only plasterboard.

Poodie age 13

Another time I was in the middle of a accident was when I was in the fifth grade. I was on the metal maypole on the playground and it was my turn to cross all the other kids’ chains. Let me discribe the maypole to you; it's an eight-foot iron pole with a wheel on top and eight chains hanging down with three rings on a chain. Each child would take a chain holding on to the ring at the end. On your turn, you'd cross all of the other chains while the other children ran and pulled you along which would make you go higher in the air. I was straight out even with the top of the maypole when my chain broke and threw me over the bank and into the ball field which was about twenty-five feet away.

Taken at a 1930 period costume celebration. The scene is reminiscent of the more permanent metal post maypole-type swing with swivel top and attached chains that stood in the playground another cited the little-known tragedy of a child who was killed in the 1930s, when a rusty metal `maypole' collapsed

I was knocked out for awhile and when I woke up a teacher was standing over me. At that moment the bell rang and I went back into class. The teacher must have been concerned about me for she got someone to take me to the Dehue doctor. His office was across from the school; we had to walked across the road and railroad tracks. He told me I had a dislocated shoulder and he can’t do anything for me. He advised me to go and see the Macbeth doctor which I never did. Of course, I didn't know that the same thing had killed my grandfather. I didn't even tell my parents about it.

My Family: Chapter 11

After we moved to Macbeth, Shirley and I made friends with the kids at the bottom of the hollow. They played in the cemetery.

Graveyard up Rum creek

They got cardboard boxes and slid down the hill. Sonny must have been with us, I just don't remember him too much except for he slept at the foot of my bed and lived in the same house as I did. I claimed him as a brother and he claimed us as his family, but he had his own set of friends and we had ours. I think the reason I don't remember too much about him has a lot to do with him being a boy. He was such a good son, never got into any trouble - I think he was a little bit afraid of Dad. I feel sorry for him because he really loved his birth mother but you could count on one hand how many times she came to see him the whole time we had him. And when she did come, he would hang on her hugging her but she would push him away. My parents gave us love and attention in their way but not by hugs and kisses. Dad gave us love by playing with us when ever he could or was home and he told everyone he had the prettiest daughters.

Small Church in Logan, WV.

Macbeth hollow had a Presbyterian church, but we belonged to the Church of God, which is a Pentecostal denomination. Mom didn’t care if Shirley and I went to Sunday school there but she wouldn't go. We went every Sunday. One Sunday, they were giving away little Bibles and we wanted one, but in order to get a Bible you had to be baptized. So we got baptized and they gave us each a Bible. When Mom heard we got baptized she got so mad that she gave us a whooping and took the Bibles away from us. She took the Bibles back to the minister and told him that he didn’t have the right to baptized us without her permission, that she didn’t believe in his church, and that we wouldn’t be coming back. We never went back again.

Remember how isolated Mom felt living at Macbeth? It really was lonesome. I remember this one time an old woman who lived by herself in the last house up Macbeth got bit by a rattlesnake. It was a while before she got any help. I can still see them carrying her out of the hollow. I don’t remember if she died. Still, Mom nagged Dad to get her out of Macbeth. I forgot how bad Mom nagged; you would do anything just to shut her up. I can remember sitting out on the front steps listening to Mom cry, and she cried a lot while we lived up Macbeth hollow. Mostly because Dad was gone so much and she was left to take care of the children.

Grandma Dillow died of cancer while we lived up Macbeth. I was ten years old and had just gotten over the mumps. Dr.Vaughn said it was the first case of mumps he had seen in years. I was lucky and wasn't that sick - I had them only on one side. Shirley wasn't so lucky, she had them on both sides and still had to go to Grandma Dillow's funeral - she was very sick. Do you recall I mentioned that the family sits up with their dead for two or three nights before they bury them? Well, one night while the family sat up with Grandma Dillow, Grandma sat straight up in her casket! The next morning, my aunts and uncles were too excited to listen to the funeral director as he tried to explain the reason to them.

Wasn’t long after Grandma Dillow's funeral, Dad came home from work and told Mom there was a family who wanted to trade homes with us. A man had approached Dad and told him his wife wanted to move, he thought she would feel better up Macbeth as it would get her away from people. The main reason was her father was a bootlegger. West Virginia is a dry state that means that you can only buy whiskey in a state store and not on weekends. And although her father had stopped selling whiskey, people were still coming to the house all night long. She had two small boys, so her husband thought it would make her happy to move away from the people that kept coming to the house. The family had lived in the house for years. The wife's brother and her were born in the house and her father did many improvements. He had added a bathhouse and put in hot and cold running water. We traded homes but we got the best of the deal because we got a sink with a cabinet above it, hot and cold water in the kitchen, and a bathhouse with two showers.

My Family: Chapter 10

Shirley age 10

One day, Dad took Sonny, my girlfriend, and me to the movies at Dehue. I never will forget the movie, it was Comin' Around the Mountain and was about hillbillies. I know it was a Monday night because that's the only day of the week they showed movies. Most of the time Dad went by himself, but this one time he took us with him. Shirley couldn't go because she was sick and Dr. Vaughn said she had a stomach flu. She was real sick and couldn't keep anything in her stomach. Dad told Mom to call him out of the theater if she got any worse. Aunt Belvia came down to our house to see Shirley and after taking one look at her told Mom it was more than a stomach flu. Since Uncle Noah had a car they took Shirley to Orville's Company doctor as that's where Uncle Noah worked in the mines. The Orville doctor said they had better get Shirley to the hospital right away, she had appendices and it was about to bust. Mom stopped at the movie house and got Dad out of the movies on the way to the hospital. It was a twenty to twenty-five minutes ride to the hospital. Shirley was fine after having her appendix out. they had busted and she stayed in the hospital a long time.

Grandma Francis had been living with Aunt Belva but she couldn't get along with Uncle Noah, so she came to live with us. Grandma didn't live with us for very long. Shirley said it was because Grandma and her got into a fight and she told her to leave. She was mean to us girls and treated us awful. I'll tell you some stories later.

Our family had gotten bigger and we needed a bigger house. I was eight by this time that's how long it took to get a four-room house with our name on the list.  We moved to Hutchinson which also had a hollow. There were about thirty homes.  It had a row of two stories houses on one side that had two rooms downstairs and two rooms upstairs, and on the other side was a row of three-room homes which sat against the mountain. There was a creek and road for only one car which ran down the center between the row of homes. And just as you came out of the hollow there were some four-room houses. Grandma isn't with us when we moved to a four-room two-story house when it become available up Hutchinson hollow.

Sonny age 10

We now have four rooms but still only two bedrooms upstairs. Mom made a living room with furniture and a kitchen downstairs and since we only had two bedrooms and one bed in each, Sonny had to share a bed with Shirley, Lucille, and I. We slept at the top of the bed while Sonny slept at the foot.  It was really crowded.  Mom doesn't like living up this holler because she couldn't visit any friends or family. Dad was still leaving on Fridays after work and didn't come back till Sunday.  It came home to her just how isolated she was when one day Ronnie was sucking on a lollypop and it came off of the stick getting stuck in his throat! I remember Mom screaming and crying as she ran up and down in front of our house wailing that he was dying. Steve, who lived next door, came to her rescue. He had to fight Mom to take Ronnie from her and get the lollypop out of his throat. Ronnie had turned blue already; he turned him up side down and patted his back hard. When the lollypop came out he gave Ronnie back to her.

Poodie age 9

We didn't have any toys to play with so we would wait until Mom got a new catalog and cut out the ladies who had on just underwear. Then we would cut out dresses and have paper dolls to play with all day on the porch. We didn't have any friends up the hollow. This one night I had a bad dream and was screaming. Dad couldn't get me awake and when I did wake up Mom cried that she wanted Dad to take me to the hospital. Dad told her to hush and for everyone to go back to bed, I just had a bad dream and I would be alright now. I remember the next day our neighbor on one side of us asked me why I was screaming last night when I told him I had a bad dream, he said I woke every one up.

My Family: Chapter 9

Shirley and I still had to go to school the day we found out our baby brother died. Our neighbor, Mrs. Childers, was there and she told Dad it would better if we went to school. She sent us over to her house to walk with her children - she had twenty in all.  We had to pass the graveyard on the way to school and we could see the pile of dirt as they were were digging his grave.  We passed his grave every day on our way school. Later I learned that Doctor Vaughn had given Dad a terrible choice; Mom or the baby (the doctor always gave the husband the choice). When a baby is born at home and the doctor can only save one he would used forceps to deliver the baby and most times break the baby's neck.  I guess that if Dad took the baby’s life over Mom's then the doctor would have cut the baby out. I can tell you it was tough on Dad, he wanted a boy in the worse way and he took that baby’s death very hard. He's whole family knew it. As tough as it was on Dad it almost killed Mom.

Aunt Wanda

I want to talk a little about my Aunt Eloise, Dad's sister. She married a man who didn't want to work and make a living for his family.  He didn't live with her, so she had to live off Welfare.  He would come home stay, for awhile, but when she got pregnant he would leave again until she had the baby then he would come back and do the same thing all over again.  My Aunt Wanda, Dad's other sister, also lived off Welfare.  Her husband had just left her with two small sons.  She lived with Aunt Eloise and they put their money together to feed nine children.   Aunt Eloise had a hard time raising her children on Welfare and she wouldn't consider adopting her children out, unlike my Aunt Alice.  However, she was desperate so she lent her children to her siblings (for one reason or another) and in return they would help her to feed, cloth, and give them the love. Before she died, she had all her children back with her. She died at the age of 43 from cancer.

Abby age 1

One day not long after our baby brother died, Dad came home with a little boy about two and half years old. We were all so excited and asked if we could keep him. Dad said he was ours and his name was Abby. He was actually Aunt Eloise's son.  Mom even told Dad that Aunt Eloise wasn't going to let him keep the child, but Dad was sure she would. Aunt Eloise had five sons and she had trouble feeding them all that's why she didn't say anything when he stole one of her boys. She let him keep Abby for awhile. I remember Mom went to the store and brought boy baby clothes because Dad didn't bring any clothes with the baby.  Eventually, when Aunt Eloise came to get Abby, Dad didn't want to give him back, but she told Dad that she missed Abby.  However, she felt sorry for Dad and told him could have the baby that she was carrying - if it was a boy.  Dad kept a close eye on her to make sure he would know when the baby came and he made sure the family knew that this baby was his - if it was a boy.  Aunt Eloise delivered a little girl and Aunt Hannah took her to live with her because she didn't have any children after twenty years of marriage. So Dad had to wait another year.

Aunt Eloise

Sure enough Aunt Eloise delivered a boy and named him Ronald Darrell (Ronald after our baby brother).  Mom picked him up and went to Logan to register him at the court house.  I have to tell you that there was no child on earth more loved and wanted than Ronnie.  So that is how Ronnie came to live with us when he was a few days old. He was spoiled too. I remember how he like to bang on the coal bucket with the poker to make music. How he sometimes bang on us but we were not allowed to hit him. Once, I snuck him outside and rubbed dirt all over him just to see what he look like dirty. Mom was so made and hollered who did this to her poor little baby.  Of course, I wasn't about to say me and Ronnie probably told her anyway.

My Family: Chapter 8

 

 When I got older and we had moved above Cly about ten houses, he came home with a new wife, her name was Betty also.

        I would trade comic books with his second wife Betty. She would go through my stack of books and pick out the ones that she hadn’t read and I would do the same with her books, and each of us would keep the books that we traded fore. Cly would kid me in front of Betty and say that he changed my diapers when I was a baby.

        I ask my mom and she said that he probably did, because mom and dad would take Shirley and me down to Betty his first wife and his house and stay the night drinking,

       The house that I was born in was three houses above theirs. When he shot his wife and kills her, we lived across the railroad tracks behind their house.

        I was walking home from school… and Cly and Betty came up the road in their car and stopped, and ask me if I wanted a ride home. I said sure and climb in the back seat, when we passed some school kids I duck down in the back because I didn’t want them to see me in the car with a black couple.

       Mary at that time said something to me and she had to lean over the front seat to see me, she ignored that I was bent over on the back seat and kept talking to me like nothing was wrong.

 Remember Aunt Alice's husband ran off and she had him brought back?  Well, he took off for good and Aunt Alice went to Logan, got a job as a live-in-maid and forgot she had any children. So we took in Alton Lee, who we called Sonny, when he was about seven. Aunt Belva & Uncle Noah took the two girls. Sonny was the son Dad never had.

Sonny age 7

Aunt Belvia and Uncle Noah lived at Orville next to the hard road, the fourth house after you crossed the bridge.  I made friends with a girl that lived two houses away from Belvia and closer to the bridge. While I was visiting Belvia, I would go down to this girl’s house to play.  She had a older sister that was retarded and her parents kept the sister in a dark bedroom in a baby’s crib. They didn’t allow the door to be open or anyone to see their daughter. I knew about her because my friend told me about her older sister. She didn’t tell me her sister was retarded, she just said she wasn’t right in the head and she would never get any older in her mind than a baby. She wasn’t allowed to take any of her friends into her sister's room but I just had to get a peek at this sister and see for myself what was wrong. So I talked her into letting me take a peek through the door. When we open it, I was shocked to find this big girl, about the same size as I am, sitting in a baby’s crib! When she saw us she shook the crib bars and made loud noises. We shut the door and ran.  I didn’t get a real good look because it was dark in the room but I never tried to see the girl again after that one time.

We were only living at Macbeth for a little while when Mom got into a fight with one of our neighbors.  Shirley was up at her friend's house playing inside when Mom hollered for her to come home.  The neighbor lady came out of her house and told Mom Shirley couldn't come right now she was busy playing.  Mom told the neighbor lady not to tell her what her daughter can and cannot do, then she jumped off the porch, grabbed the clothesline pole, and bolted over a 5 foot fence (Dad always put a fence around our house). Mom would get into other fights with this neighbor lady, always chasing her into her house.  And as much as Mom was fighter, she was also good at everything -  all you had to do was ask.  Once we stayed all night with the another next door neighbor when she had her baby.  At other times, Mom helped the neighbor ladies paint and paper their houses.  You just couldn't get her mad.

Mom was going to have another baby but no one told us, and the first I knew was when we were sent next door to stay the night with a neighbor.  The next morning we went home and Dad told us the baby had died, he let us into the bedroom to see the baby.  They named him Ronald Lee.  I remember he was beautiful with a head full of black hair and Dad said he had two teeth already.  The baby was so big he had to be buried in a coffin would have fitted a one year old.

My Family: Chapter 7

Once in a while, Mom would give us sweet milk and cornbread as a treat for supper,it was the milk that was the treat. We would have nothing else and there were never forks on the table, we ate with a spoon. Dad might have eaten with a fork on a Sunday but I only ever remember seeing him eat with a spoon. Mom was forever telling me to stop raking my teeth across the spoon. Every day, on a weekday, for breakfast we would have: gravy, eggs, biscuits, jelly, Karo syrup, and apple butter. For supper we had: soup beans, fried potatoes, and cornbread. On Sundays we might have fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, and cornbread (during the summer she would add corn, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, cabbage, and noodles). Sometimes we have canned tomatoes with noodles which had sugar in them. In the summer, we go with Mom (taking a knife and a poke) to the mountain to hunt for poke greens for our supper. Our diet never varied, this was all the food we ever ate. This one time mom had choose which chicken she wanted for dinner, she caught it by the neck and was ringing its neck when she felt it break she let go so it would flop around, instead the chicken got up and run under the house, mom was surprise  she said that she could have swore that she felt its neck break she said that she wasn't going after it because it was meant to live so she picked another chicken
 we told her that she was wasting her time that we wouldn't eat any of it after watching her kill it, she got mad and said it was all in our head. About two weeks later the chicken came out from under the house and it walk with a crooked head and die of old age.
 We ate and spoke differently then the North does, here are some words that we used: A butter knife was called a case knife, a bag was called a poke, and soda is called pop.

Poodie (me) age 8

Here I am at about eight years old and things haven’t change much at home, Dad still drank and worked the Hoot Owl shift. Mom joined the church so she doesn't drink anymore, but they still fight. I heard Mom tell Dad as soon as her girls were old enough to take care of themselves, she was going to pay him back for every wrong he was doing her.  I tell you it was wonderful not to have her drinking, but I heard her cry a lot when Dad would leave on Friday after work and we wouldn't see him again until Sunday night.
 
Dad's niece and her family lived in front of us on the other side of the railroad tracks next to the main road.  They lived next door to a lady that every one knew was crazy.  She would come out of her house cussing and saying she was going to dig a grave.  One time while I had been over at my cousin's house playing, she and I met on the railroad tracks (I just happened to leave my cousin’s house at the same time as she left her house) she had a garden pick in her hands and this time it was her husband’s grave she was going to dig.  I got scared and ran home screaming, I made it to the front door and fell in.  Dad picked me up and asked what was wrong,  I told him the crazy lady was going to get me. He said to stay out of her way and we watched her go up the railroad tracks, all the while hitting the ground with the pick and cussing. There was a salesman at our house that day, he was trying to sell mom a sewing machine.  He asked Dad if someone was going to do anything. Dad said no and said her husband would take care of her as soon as he came home.

Mom bought the sewing machine but as soon as she put the needle through her finger, she got rid of it. Dad's niece took the sewing machine and finish paying for it. Mom sew by hand, making us dresses out of the flour and corn meal bags.

It was about this time that the neighbor, next door to my cousin's, shot and killed his wife. They were a black couple who had been drinking and got in a fight. He chased her around the outside of the house with a gun and shot her. He was gone about five years and after he came home, he never drank another drop of whiskey. His house and job were still waiting for him when he came home.

My Family: Chapter 5

On the weekends we used the coal mine as a playground. Kids my age would play in the sand house. We were ignorant about the danger, but we could have been killed. It was a small room made out of cinders blocks. A coal car would empty sand through a chute in a window at the top of the sand  house and it filled up. We couldn't play in the house when it was full of  sand there was no room to crawl in. There was a window at the bottom of the sand house about two feet off the ground. A miner shoveled the sand out of the window into a chute which lead to the coal temple to wash the coal before it went into the coal cars. We climbed through the bottom window and play in the sand. Sometimes there was just enough room to get in the house where the miner had shovel the sand out, and other times the sand house would be half full. We are so lucky the sand didn't cave in on top of us and bury us alive or block the window so we couldn't get out.
The twelve-year old boys and girls played in the lumberyard and once built a tower out 2x4s that had three floors; we were lucky that this didn’t fall down on top of us. The lumberyard men tore it down on Monday when they started work. We only played around the mines on the weekends when the mine was not working. One time they left the fort standing for awhile, I don’t remember how long though.
Across the road from the lumber yard was circular steps that the men used as a exscape  in case of an accident.   We went over and looked down the circular steps with water at the bottom. Shirley went down and touched the water before climbing back up. I was too scare to go down the first step because the steps were only wide enough for one man at a time. There was also a big fan, as big as a house, which pumped air out of the cave so the men could breath. We would stand in front of it and let it blow on us. Sometimes it would lift us up off the ground and push us a little.
Another time, the older teenagers built a merry-go-round out of two railroad ties. They put one in the ground and the other on top with a railroad spike. One child got on each end and the others pushed them around. Everyone, who could hang on, got a turn. That merry-go-round gave us a lot of fun and lasted until we got tired of playing on it

Ronnie age 5 Bonnie age 3

Different salesman would come up the hollow to sell people stuff like ice cream - not one bar or cone but five gallons in a tub. People didn’t have refrigerators they had Iceboxes. When my parents brought ice cream it was usually on the 4th of July, we would have to hurry up and eat it before it melted all away.We ate ice cream cones all day long.
The iceman would come up the hollow once a week and all of us kids would follow behind his truck and grab the loose ice; sometimes he would chip us off a piece with his ice pick. I remember this one time a salesman came to the house and to sell Mom a set of dishes that wouldn’t break; they were called Malta Mack. He was throwing dishes across the room as proof that they would not break.

Poodie age 12  Lucille age  9

        There was a man who would bring his pony to every house, and parents would pay to get their children’s pictures taken on the pony. This one time my cousin, who was six years old, was at our house and she would put her big toe out in front of the pony’s hoof daring it step on it. She wouldn’t let up, and every time she did this the pony looked at her, it's owner finally told her to stop as she was upsetting the pony. But she went ahead and did it anyway. Well you can guess, the pony did step on her toe and the owner had a hard time getting that pony off her. It was bleeding pretty bad when he got the pony away from her. She was screaming. I know that incident made a lasting impression on her because now we've reached an older age, she asked me if I remembered the time when the pony stepped on her toe. The picture to the left was taken about three years later. 

      

My Family: Chapter 6

I think Dad spent most of the weekends with his parents. I know Aunt Hannah worked in Black Bottom and he stopped in and see her. Black Bottom was where all the juke joints were. If we did see him, he was drunk and he only came home because he wanted to get something and then he would leave again. One time, as he got into a car with his friends, Mom threw rocks at him. His friends laughed at her as they drove away.

Dad and a drinking buddy

When Dad worked the night shift, Mom bribed one of us girls to sit up with her with a Pepsi at least that's what she gave me the times when I sat up with her. If I fell asleep, she would wake me up and remind me that I was to stay awake. We still had to go to school the next day, then Dad got a job on day shift and got it  better for all of us.

Dad had bought Mom a twenty-two hand gun to protect her self from the animals coming down from the mountain. All of his friends knew that she had a gun. Mom and Dad just had an animal come down off of the mountain the week before this, Dad had some hog meat, which he got for helping someone slaughter their pig, he had hung it outside (in the wash room) where it was cold and the meat was froze. One night he heard a noise out on the back porch and went to investigate, he said it was the biggest dog that he ever seen. It had tore the door to the wash room down and gotten into the meat. He tied the dog up and block the wash room door because he wanted to show it to us girls the next morning but the dog had chew through the rope and escaped  back thorough the door.

Yolyn Church

Mom joined the Church of God and she stopped drinking. She took Shirley and me to church with her. I loved Sunday School and church afterwards. I would never miss a Sunday or Wednesday when they held service. They had church every Wednesday and sometimes they had tent revivals that came up the hollow. I go there everyday for a couple of weeks and people would bring patients from the hospitals who wanted to be healed so that we could pray for and heal them. I got scared the first time Mom got the Holy Ghost and talked in tongues jumping up and down. Sometimes, Mom had the church ladies over to house to quilt. We only had a kitchen and two bedrooms, Mom had sewing ladies in one of the bedrooms. I liked Church life, while it lasted.

My Family: Chapter 4

One day after we had moved to Macbeth, I can remember Mom took Lucille and me and walked to Orville to the Company store for food (about one mile). She had some scrip left over from Orville so she couldn't spend anywhere but at that store. A man she knew drove by, he stopped and asked her if she wanted a lift but since we were almost at the store Mom said no. Then he asked her if Lucille and I were her daughters and when she said yes, he replied that she didn’t look old enough to have daughters our age (what an old line). No one stopped us on our way home. I was about 5 1/2 and Lucille was about 2 1/2. Mom carried Lucille with a bag of food most of the way while I carried a light bag, and we stopped to rest some of the way home. By the end of our long walk both Lucille and I were crying.

Coal being brought out of the mine

At Macbeth, Dad drove the cars which hauled the coal out of the mines.  The cars would be connected together to look like a train so it also ran on rails and had a cable that the cars were hooked to. He never got hurt again in the mines after he started to work for Hutchinson Coal Company.

Finally when I am six years old, I got to go to school and I can't wait to learn how to read books. I remember Mom took us on the bus to Logan and I tried to read all the signs as we would pass them.  We came home with a lot five cent toys that she bought at the 5 & 10 cent store for us. I hated school once I found out that I had to walk a mile every day, Shirley had to walk with me.  She hit me because I would cry and throw up - crying made me throw up.  I cried everyday and everyday I went home to beg Dad to buy a car. He only laughed at me and tell Mom how smart I was and I was going to be a genius in school.  I repeated the first grade. Shirley complained I embarrassed her in front of the other kids on the walk home. To get away from the other kids, Shirley would make us walk the railroad tracks and I cried all the more.  There were a lot of kids who walked home who lived in the lower part of Macbeth (Hutchinson) - we lived in the upper half. Shirley had friends which she wanted to walk home with, so we didn't walk the tracks every day only when she wanted to punish me. When we moved back to Macbeth (Hutchinson), Shirley met this girl who lived a couple of houses away from us, she was in a grade lower.  So when we started school, Shirley dropped back one grade to be in the same class with her.

Dehue School

One day when I was crying on our way home and Shirley was hollering at me as usual, this eighth grade boy (he was in his last year at Dehue and he had a brother in my class) felt sorry for me so he picked me up and carried me on his back until we got to his house.  Even then I still had a long way to walk.

Shirley once told me that I was adopted, we were standing out in front of our house by the gate and I cried because I didn’t want to be adopted. She told me to stop crying that she was just joking with me that I wasn’t adopted. She said hateful things to me just to get me to cry.

Dad and Mom were good people to have around when someone needed help. There was this one time when I was seven years old, a blind man and his daughter came to our house to beg for food. He was gave Dad this sad story about his life, how he and his wife had no place to live, and how he waited for his son to come home from the war.  Dad invited him and his family to move in with us. The man said he had to go get his wife and he would come back; his daughter was about fifteen.  They stayed for a long while. 

Shirley (age 10) and Mom (age 28)

I don’t remember how long, I remember that when they left the blind man was striking out at his daughter with his cane because she cried that she didn’t want to leave. We lived in a three-room house at that time so I don’t remember where they slept.  Grandma Francis had just moved out, she went to Kentucky to live with her brother and take care of his wife because she had cancer.

    

My Family: Chapter 3

A neighbor and Dad got into a play fight one day over a garden hoe. They tried

Lucille, age 3

 to take it away from the each other when I jumped in between them, cried, and told her to leave my Daddy alone.  I got hit in the head with the hoe.  As I screamed, blood just poured out of my head. Mom cried and told Dad he killed me. Dad rinsed my head in a dishpan full of water which they had to empty

three times by the time the neighbor got back with the doctor.  He stopped the bleeding and said I was going to be alright it wasn't as bad as it looked.  He put a black salve on my head with a bandage. I still have a scar on my head to remind me not to interfere when two people are fighting.

The neighbor had a daughter who was older then Shirley. The girl loved oranges, she would always suck on an orange. If we got an orange that would have been a treat for us. I don't know why she didn't just drink orange juice. I remember once when she was at least ten years old, she sat on her back porch steps while Shirley, Lucille, and I sat on our back porch. The porches faced each other. We watched as she made a hole in the orange sucked all the juice out, and then threw it out in the yard. One of us would go get it and eat it, she did this until we all had an orange. I’m going to get disgusting here and tell you why I remember about the oranges. I always had worms - they look like earthworms. As I sat and ate my orange, I felt a tickle in my rectum, reach down, pulled out a worm and held it up then threw it on the ground and continued to eat my orange - I was about four year old.

Shirley, age 6

All three of us had worms at one time or another, I remember Mom giving us worm medicine.

My Aunt Alice's husband left her, without food, to go parts unknown. Mom went to Lyburn to get her to bring her and the children home with her, she took me and Lucille with her - Shirley was in school. Alice didn’t want to go and laid in bed with her baby while her other two children took care of themselves. Mom told her if she didn’t get her lazy butt off of the bed and pack, she was going to whop her. She wasn’t at our house but a few days when her husband came for her. Grandma Francis told me years later, Aunt Alice went to the government in Charleston, told them her story, and since he had cross over the state line, they brought him back. Mom and Aunt Alice's husband got into a fight and I can still see him hiding underneath the kitchen table to get away from her.

Aunt Belva & Uncle Noah

Aunt Belvia and Uncle Noah were destined to meet in Orville. Belvia was nineteen and Noah was twenty-nine year old. He just got home from the war. Belvia said she didn’t want to marry Noah . Mom didn’t like Noah, she accused him of killing her cat. Not only her cat but everyone's cat in the camp. They were always finding a dead cat with its neck broken. Mom and Belva got into a argument over Noah because he didn’t like cats so mom wouldn’t let him come in her yard. He would stand at the gate and holler for Aunt Belva. She announce she was leaving and went to stay with her sister in Tennessee but Uncle Noah followed her. She couldn't say no and they got married lived in Tennessee for a few years. After they came back to Logan to live, I don’t remember her ever coming to our house. Uncle Noah went to work for Orville mines and they lived next to the hard road across from his brother and wife. This took place after we had moved out of Orville camp and went to Macbeth. Mom and Aunt Belva still didn't talk to one another. It would be years before they talk to each other but she never came to our house again. It was after Grandma Francis moved across the creek from us that they began to talk again. Aunt Belva would visit Grandma Francis almost every day, and because she still was our aunt we would go to her house after she moved to Orville. I was with Aunt Belva before she died and we talked about how she was a scare of the dark when she said, "I bet Marie wasn’t a scare of the dark." I told her a story about how afraid of the dark Mom was:

Uncle Vondon was in England during the war and he needed money to come home so he asked Mom and Dad for a loan. Dad had just gotten a check from a mine accident so they wired it to Uncle Vondon. He came home from the war in 1946 and lived with us for awhile. He would babysit for Mom and Dad while they went out to drink. He would give us a bath then sit us on the front porch steps daring us to get dirty.And if we moved off of the porch, he would paddle our behinds. This one time after he finished bathing me, I don’t remember why, I took off naked and ran through the camp all the way down to the last house along our row of houses. I was always going to visit Ike and his wife, Pearl, who lived there. Ike’s sister lived across railroad tracks behind us in the last house beside the Orville hollow. When Uncle Vondon got to the house, Pearl told him that I had a fever and the measles.  She saved me from getting a good spanking.  Uncle Vondon left sometime after that and went to Ashland, Kentucky to get a job.  He was twenty-four years old. He went to war right after he graduated high school where he joined the C. Bees. that went straight over to help England before American got in the war.  He became a mechanic in the Air Force and I heard him tell Dad and Mom he was shot down and he went missing for awhile.  While he was hiding, he said that he saw the creeks were red with blood.

I can remember another story about Ike (who was Uncle Noah’s brother) and Pearl.  They were taking their family to visit somewhere in Logan. Ike had a pickup truck and their kids rode in the back.   Shirley and I decided to go along with them so we climbed into the back of the truck.

Me (Poodie)

Our parents didn’t know we went, Ike and Pearl didn’t know we were in the back of the truck until they got to where they were going. I don’t know how they let our parents know that we were with them. We didn’t get home until dark, Dad was waiting for us when we got out of the truck. We had been gone all day.

Dad and Mom drank and fought so much on the weekends the neighbors in Orville went to the mining company's superintendent and complained that they couldn’t get any sleep on the weekends because the Dillo girls screamed and cried. The neighbor’s at Orville finally complain enough that the Company boss told Dad we would have to move. He helped Dad get a job at Macbeth, who had changed their name to Hutchinson by this time. Now we are back to living in a three- room house again, across the railroad tracks and up against the mountain. Dad dug the mountain out from the back of our house so we would have a back yard. There were three community water pumps in that part of the camp, all of the houses had to use the pumps and carry their water. Finally the coal company did put water in all the homes although there weren't any sinks and no plumbing in the houses.

Here's the story of how I got my nickname, Poodie: It's the name Dad gave me when I was first born. Mom had promise an old lady (in the holler) she could name my sister but she was on vacation when Shirley was born so she missed it. Mom tried again when I was born but told the old lady if she was gone she would wait until she got home. Sure enough, the lady was gone when I was born and Mom waited for three months before she gave me the ugly name of Alma. Meanwhile while they waited, Dad told Mom that they had to call me something, so Dad told her that he was calling me 'Poodie.' The name stuck and it's how I am known to all my family and my friends while growing up. Once the teacher called roll at school, and I told her my name wasn't Alma it was Poodie, she said that she had to call me what was on my birth certificate.

My Family: Chapter 2

Orville, West Virginia

My younger sister, Lucille, was born in Orville when I was two years and six month old. Where we lived, there was two rows of homes and in between the homes was a dirt road which was called an alley. The back of our house set up against this alley, it was used for delivery trucks. At the front of our house was a hill, at top was the main road which we call a hard road because it was paved with blacktop. This one time a salesman stopped at the house and was trying to sale a tricycle to Mom, I was ridding the tricycle while he was trying to talk Mom into buying it. She didn’t because cost too much. The tricycle was three dollars.

After Lucille was born, we moved next to the railroad tracks in a four-room house. Mom named Lucille after the lady who lived next door to us who were drinking buddies of my parents on the weekends. Mom and Dad would start to drink on a Friday evening and not stop until Sunday night. My parents would fight and drink most of the time on the weekends only.

Mom and Lucille

I remember this one night, when I was four years old, that we sat on the back porch and screamed for hours because we were alone in the house. Someone did come and hush us up; putting us to bed. Our bed was pushed up against the window of our bedroom. If we did go to bed early on Saturday night, some times I would get woken up by Mom or Dad stepping on me trying to climb threw the window. One night, Dad woke me up as he tried to get out the window, Mom was behind him in the doorway with an cast-iron clothes iron. One was always trying to get away from the other but mostly Mom getting away from Dad.

You didn't mess with my Mom, she would whop you in a heartbeat.  Once Mom got into an argument with our neighbor on the other side. The neighbor's husband was a drinker also so it probable had something to do with her husband drinking at our house. Everyone had a slop jar to use at night instead of going out to the outhouse after dark for fear of snakes or other animals. As the woman came around the corner of our house, Mom was standing on the porch waiting for her - it was late at night. I was in the doorway watching. Mom threw the contents of the slop jar in her face, as it went all over her there was a lot of screaming between the two but the woman didn't come any farther than the corner of the house.

end of homes in Orville

The neighbors couldn’t call the police and get them to come out and settle a disturbance since there was no law up any of the hollows. The nearest police was in Logan and that was twenty miles away. No one had a phone (phones at that time were not affordable) and Logan only had a sheriff. If there was a Constable that lived close by, they did not interfere for fear of my dad. 
Dad didn’t drink during the week and never miss a day’s work. I don’t remember my father ever taking a day off from work unless he got hurt in the mines. The miners risked their lives every time they go down in a cave. You never hear about the small cave-ins where only one or two would get hurt, because it was expected with the job. My father was forevermore having his bones broken. He had his neck, back, legs, and arms broken at different times. Someone was always throwing his miners clothes on the front porch; telling Mom he was in the hospital in Logan. His job was to put the timber to hold the cave up and sometimes accidents do happen. My fondest memory is when Dad was in bed with a broken leg and Shirley had carried home the measles. She gave them to Lucille and myself, so we all were sick (except for my mom) and laying in bed with my dad. Mom carried us scrambled egg with bologna sandwiches to eat. These were cheap sandwiches since the eggs came from our chickens and dad had the bologna for his lunches. Food wasn't a peculiar of ours.

We never had much food to eat. In my part of the south don't count on getting an offer of  food or drink when you visit someone. It's just not happening unless it's dinner time, then you will get invited to set down and eat but you are expected to have the manners to say 'no thank you, I was just leaving.'

My sister, Shirley, was the baby for three years before I was born. She didn't like me at all and she was spoiled. When my Mom gave us toys, she expected us to share but Shirley would claim everything as hers, so that's why I didn't have any toys to call my own. And if I did get toys, I don’t remember they lasted long. I was tough on everything according to Shirley which is why she didn’t let me touch anything that belonged to her. At six years old, Shirley went to school at Cham about a mile up the hollow from Orville in a two room school house that went to the fourth grade. I wanted to go to school real bad, so I decided to follow Shirley. She would walk along the roadway and I walked along the railroad tracks. She was dressed for school but I only had on underwear. The underwear at that time was a t-shirt and panties connected with buttons down the front and a split in the back at waist high (just like the one on the left).

We got to school about the same time. I don't know how the teacher let Mom know that I was there, because we had no telephone or a car. But I got to stay at school until Mom picked me up and after a spanking, I got the idea that I wasn't allowed to go to school. I stayed at home and played with Shirley's toys and when she came home from school she would beat me up if  I was still playing with her things. She had everything a little girl would want; doll, table, chairs, and dishes. I always tried to have everything put away by the time she would get home but sometimes she would catch me. Mom would always holler at her and tell her she had to share. My big toe nail is still cracked down the middle where she hit me with a hammer for touching her toys when she was playing with them.

Me and Shirley Ann

The only reason that I know how my toenail got cracked is she told me this is what happened after we got older in our teens. She once tried to get me to eat lye while Mom was washing clothes. Mom washed clothes in two big tubs with a scrub broad, she had to build two fires out in the yard and put a tub on each fire. One was for wash and the other one was to rinse the clothes in, she used homemade soap that she made with lye. It had cross-bones on the can, and Mom had set the can down on the porch with a spoon in it and Shirley tried to get me to take a taste. But I wouldn't, and I don't know who's idea it was, but we tried to get Lucille to taste it. We wasn’t trying to hurt her but we knew it was something that we shouldn’t be eating. At first, Lucille wouldn't take a taste but then I pretended to take a bite and then put the spoon to her mouth. She must have got one grain in her mouth because she started to scream. Mom came running, grabbed Lucille and asked us what was wrong. We told her that Lucille ate lye. She made Lucille throw up. Mom started to cry and scream while somebody went and got the Company doctor. When he got there, he gave Mom some medicine saying Lucille was a lucky girl that she didn’t swallow any of the poison. Her mouth was full of blisters. I don't remember getting a spanking for what we did. So I guess Mom thought that Lucille got into the lye on her own. Lucille was one and half years old, I was four, and Shirley was seven. And I will admit that I was jealous of both sisters.

                                                  

left to right: Shirley, Willa Jean, Patsy, Jimmy, me.
Mom standing in doorway of our two room house which had a bedroom and
kitchen with a wash room in Orville, WV.

Perry Francis and Hattie Sluss part 2

Remember my mom's parents, Perry and Hattie?    Perry Francis died on April 05, 1941, two weeks before I was born; he dislocated his shoulder from shoveling sand and died from blood poisoning. The Company doctor didn’t treat him for a dislocated shoulder but just gave him a pill that was a cure all. His whole arm swelled up to twice the normal size, but by the time he went to the hospital, it was too late. He was sixty-five years old. The cemetery where my Grandpa Francis is buried are still in Chambers.  The family Chambers owns the land and takes care of the cemetery. My cousin, Thurman, married a Chamber’s girl.  Harris Funeral Home made a mistake on their files, they had the location of Grandpa Francis' burial at Macbeth, but Grandma Francis and their children said that he was buried at Cham graveyard. Maybe they made the mistake because my mother lived at Macbeth and he was laid out at home - not in the funeral parlor. In those days the funeral home would bring the casket home, and set it up in a room for the family to sit up and view him all night.  However, Grandpa Francis was laid out at his friend’s home. My Aunt Hannah and my Grandma Francis told me, at different times, that something strange happened after Grandpa Francis' funeral.  Grandma had put Grandpa’s clothes in a box which was placed in a corner of the viewing room. While everyone was sitting around talking after the funeral, the box raised up off the floor. My Aunt Hannah said she never did understand how that happens.

My sisters and I went in search of Grandpa Francis' grave, but since the grave had no marker it is lost to us.  However, if we go by where Aunt Belvia said that he was buried in the Chamber's cemetery then we think that we found the grave but since it's unmarked, we have no proof. Especially since the Chamber's called the funeral home and they said that he was buried at Macbeth cemetery which is no longer there. Grandma Francis once told me she thought Mom was going to miss her father’s funeral because I was going to be born. Grandma said that Mom was washing clothes when she went into labor with me - Mom always did the wash on Monday. So I was born eleven days after my Grandpa Francis' burial.

Grandma Francis died on Dec. 26, 1964 at the age of sixty-six, she died from leukemia and a heart attack.  Grandparents had five children while living in Rum Creek hollow.   These are some stories about them:

Their oldest daughter, Alice, got to close too the fire place when she was about four years old and caught her dress on fire.  She had some ugly looking scars on one side of her body for the rest of her life.  She was lucky to be alive maybe that's why Grandma babied and favor her. Aunt Alice had a stroke and died in a nursing home in Logan, West Virginia.  She was eighty-seven. Two of her three children died from heart attacks in their forties.

My grandparent's oldest boy, Vondon, never had any children that he claimed.  Once, when he left our house in Orville and went to Ashland, Kentucky, which is across the river from Huntington, West Virginia, to work.  He met a girl from Huntington who later said that she had given birth to his son. But Uncle Vondon said that the baby didn’t belong to him and that was the end of that until the boy grew up. After his son grew up he went looking for his father, and found aunt Belva living in Logan and explain who he was and gave her a picture of himself  to send to Uncle Vondon who was living in North Carolina at the time.  When Vondon got the picture, he showed it to all his friends and asked them who they thought it was? The son looked so much like the father. Vondon had made arrangements with his son, through my Aunt Belvia, to meet in Logan at aunt Belva's but before they could Uncle Vondon died of a sudden heart attack. Aunt Belva went to uncle Vondon's  funeral  while there she ask his wife if she had something of uncle Vondons that she could give to the son ,  she gave her Uncle Vondon’s Air Force service ring. When the son show up for the meeting aunt Belva gave him the ring. Uncle Vondon never came home to visit his mother - he didn’t go to his mother’s funeral either. However, he did come home to visit my mom. Aunt Belvia said  one time she didn’t know that he was home until she saw him on the streets in Logan. He died from a heart attack at the age of forty-eight.

Aunt Tince was married twice and is still living.  She had five children.  She lost her youngest son, Ronny, to a heart attack just before his fifty-fifth birthday.

My mom died at the age of forty-eight also from a heart attack.    
Aunt Belvia married but never had any children.  She died at the age of seventy-eight of cancer.
     

William P. Francis 1876-1941

Hattie Sluss 1898 - 1964

                                                         

Golden Alice Francis 1919 - 2006

                                                    

Ida Marie Francis 1921 - 1969

                                                       

Vondon Lee Francis 1922 - 1970

Vicy Jane (Tince) Francis 1924 - ?

                                                                  

  Belva  Louise Francis 1926 - 2005

My Family: Chapter 1

Aunt Hannah and my mother, Ida Marie Francis (she hated the name Ida and would only answer to Marie) went to school together at Dehue. My father was seventeen years old when he fell in love with my mother after Aunt Hannah brought her home for lunch. Marie was fifteen years old, she lived in Yolyn behind Lowe's Beer Garden which is four miles above Dehue. The same place where my Aunt Belva was born, and my Grandma Francis had to stay in bed for two years after her birth - I don't really know why. Mom like to tease Belva about how she was force to take care of her, how she would feed her dishwater and give her a bath at the water pump that everybody got their water from. Mom was five years older than Belva.

Wilbur would walk all the way to Yolyn to see Marie. My Dad's brother, Bud (who all the miners nickname Dynamite because he blew the coal from inside the mines), own a modal “T” Ford and would sometimes give Dad a ride to Marie’s house. Mom said that Bud was always wrecking the car and the guys would have to pick it up and set it back on the road. Dad never own a car, if he wanted to go somewhere he always got someone to take him or he walked. All his friends had a car, and all his brothers, but he never wanted one. If he had a car, with the way that he drank, he would have drove it over the side of a mountain and kill himself.

At one of our family reunions, I was talking about how Dad couldn't drive and one of my cousins said once when his father was in the hospital and my dad was at their house, my dad told him that he would drive him to the hospital to see his dad. So Dad took their car and drove to the hospital. My cousin now understands why Dad scared him so badly with his driving, because he thought Dad was going to drive over the mountainside. My cousin said that Dad drove real slow.

Dad was eighteen when he married my sixteen year old mother. Grandma Francis didn’t want her and my father to get married - they were too young. However, Grandpa Francis had an idea, there was no waiting period in Kentucky (Logan had three day wait), so he planned a trip to Kentucky to visit his family and would take Mom with him - helping her and Dad get married once there. They picked up Dad on their way out of the hollow. So that's how they eloped to Beauty, Kentucky and got married. After they were married, Dad’s parents moved away from Dehue. Dad and Mom moved, too.

They went to Accoville up Buffalo Creek that's where my sister, Shirley, was born. My parents lived in a house that had a graveyard behind it. Dad work on the third shift (nickname hoot-owl shift). My mom was always afraid of the dark and she was scared to stay alone in a house, so she would stay up all night and do house work. Once she saw a black cat run across the floor in front of her and she chased it with a broom until it went under the bed.  One side of the bed was up against the wall, she got down on the floor and look under the bed but there was no cat. She searched for the cat but she couldn’t find it and she swore that there was no way for that cat to get out of her house. She thought that it was a ghost. We were all taught to believe in ghosts and witches.  When I was little, I would sit quietly and listen to the grown- ups tell stories. I'd love to hear their memories about things that went bump in the night.  When Dad came home from work, she told him that she didn’t like living in that house and ask him to move.

They next moved to Slagle where they had a house next to the mountain. My sister was still a baby.  Wild animals would come down off of the mountain very close to the house.  One day, Mom heard my sister talking on the porch calling, "here kitty, kitty." She went outside to see what she was calling and discovered it was a bobcat, they moved again.  In order for them to change houses, Dad had to get another job at a different mine, because all the homes were taken in that coal camp.

The mines always need men (they still do to this day) you don’t hear nothing about it in the news but if you read the newspaper in a mining town (such as Logan) a miner gets killed almost everyday in an accident.  On September 2, 1936, the Macbeth Mine blew killing ten men. Only six months after the first Macbeth explosion, on March 11, 1937, the Macbeth Mine blew again killing eighteen more men. Like the first explosion, the blast hit only one section of the mine about a mile from the bottom. Several men escaped without injury. Some by walking up the slope to the top of the cave that leads outside, and some by a screw-type escape ladder with 152 steps.  The reason I know that there's that many steps is because my sister counted them, she was the only one brave enough to go to the bottom and count them. It's pitch dark half way down and like a deep well with water at the bottom. Miners believed the explosion was caused by natural gas that was set off by a spark from one of the motor cars that takes coal to the top of the cave. The cause of the explosion was blamed on methane gas. Methane gas is colorless, odorless, and flammable. It is formed when plants decay in places where there is little air. It is the primary cause of mine explosions. The Macbeth Mine blew with such a force and intensity that it had to a large amount of gas to have caused so much damage.

Dad got a job working at Macbeth mines and that is where I was born, at home in a three-room house. Dr.Vaughn was the company doctor. My sister Shirley was two years eleven months old.  When I was two years old (I know this because I have a picture of Shirley and me standing in front of the porch and Mom standing in the doorway pregnant with my sister, Lucille), Dad went to work for Orville about one mile up the road from Macbeth, where his brother and all his drinking buddies worked. We moved into a two-room house with a wash room add-on. Our beds were made out of an iron head and foot-board while the springs were metal.

We had a high-tension box on the pole next to our porch; one night we had an electrical storm and lightening struck the box which bounced through a window and hit Dad and Mom’s bed. My mom jumps outs of bed and was going to go out the door when Dad stopped her. If she had open the door and stepped outside she would have been electrocuted. She was scare of storms after that for the rest of her life, when a storm came she always made sure we were all in the house.

My Dad, Mom, and sister, Shirley

                                                 

Marie & Wilbur Dillow (Mom & Dad)