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.