My Family: Chapter 56

Sonny went into the Army but didn’t like very much and wanted to get out - he was 18 years old. While on leave he went to visit Uncle Vondon in North Carolina where my sister, Lucille, was living at the time. One day, they were outside talking while Sonny cleaned his gun when he got the idea that if Lucille shot him in the foot he would get discharged. Well, Lucille didn't want to shoot him, but he persisted by saying he was going to say that it was an accident and he shot himself while he was cleaning his gun. She kept telling him no, but he finally talked her into shooting him. Uncle Vondon heard the shot and ran out of the house. Sonny told him it was an accident but I don’t think Uncle Vondon believed their story. However it must have worked on the Army because they give him a discharge. I really think it was his heart which got him out of the service. By the time he was 21 he had a pacemaker put in, and he died at the age of 49.

This is one of my weekends at home and why I didn’t stay at home among other things. Dad and Mom had left me to take care of Bonnie and Ronnie on Friday while they went to spend the weekend with friends to drink and party. On Sunday night they came home drunk as usual and I had to helped get them to bed. I put them in the same bed in our old room because it had two double beds and the only fireplace which had bricks around the hearth to keep the fire from falling on the wood floors. I had to go outside and get more coal to put on the fire so I took Bonnie and Ronnie with me. While we were outside, I heard Mom screamed - I was already upset and jumpy from getting them to bed. So I ran into the house to see what is going on. Dad was in front of the fireplace calling Mom names and throwing bricks from the fireplace at her. Mom screamed and dodged the bricks. I yelled at him and asked him if he was crazy. He told me he was going to kill Mom because she wouldn’t let him touch her. I told them both I was leaving and they could kill each other for all I cared. Dad got in the other bed and I put all the bricks back around the fireplace. I took Bonnie and Ronnie over to stay with Grandma Francis while I went to stay with Aunt Wanda in Man.  I’m 17 years old, Mom is 37 years old while Dad is 39 years old - they acted younger than I did.

My Family: Chapter 52

I had a cousin would try to hang out with us but we threw rocks at her to make her go home because we didn’t want her dad to follow her and whip her with the razor strap. She asked me once, after we became adults, if I remember doing this to her. I said I did because every time she’d come up to the house, there came her dad with the razor strap to whip her every step of the way back down the road. Her mom and dad came up to our house all the time. Every day after supper, her dad would come up talk to Dad while we did the dinner dishes. If we dropped a knife onto the floor, we would say he was coming for a visit. That’s an old wives tale; if you drop a knife a male was coming for a visit. 

Dad’s niece met her second husband at our house at one of the house parties and I got my first speeding ticket driving his car. He had a wife and a house full of children which lived further up the hollow but, like all the rest of the men, once they started to come to the parties they just kept coming back. Some of the men’s wives would come with them but mostly the wives thought they were above messing with White Trash. These wives would sometimes stand at the fence and call us names. One time Mom took out after a lady who came to the house and called Mom names because her husband was at our house drinking on the weekends. Mom went after her and picking up a pipe as she went, the woman ran and got into her car real fast. 

My Family: Chapter 49

Later that day, I called Mom at the our neighbor’s house (remember we didn’t have a phone) and asked to pick me up at aunt Belva home in Logan so I could come home. She said Dad and her would come and get me , and I was to stay at Aunt Belva's house until they got there. I don’t remember exactly how they got to Logan, but I do remember after arriving Dad left again saying he would be back with a ride and we were to stay there.  Well, we waited all day for him to come back; even Mom got tired of waiting. I talked Mom into walking, she didn’t want too, but I told her that she wouldn’t have to walk long, someone would come along and pick us up to take us home.

I was half right, we did get picked up but we were dropped off at the mouth of Rum Creek Hollow. We still had about 2 ½ more miles to go. As we started up the hollow, someone came along and we hitched a ride the rest of the way home. Dad got home about midnight, he came through the door drunk and hollering for Mom and me.

I was laying  with Mom on their bed; we were reading by an oil lamp as we had no electric lights. Shirley was now married to David and they were in the other room sleeping. Dad hollered so loud he woke everyone up but no one dared answer him. Suddenly, Mom jumped off the bed and blew out the light so he couldn’t see us. Then she ran out the back door and left me to face Dad alone.

He yelled at me to strike a match and light the lamp so he could see to beat me, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to disobey him but I didn’t want to get beaten either. So I snicked into Shirley’s bedroom and asked her what she would do if she were me. Here is what she said, ”You’re a fool if you light the lamp and just let him beat you. Mom’s no fool, she ran. Do what you want but if it was me, I’d leave.”

That’s what I did, I went out the back door and down to my girl friend’s house to stay the rest of the night. The next day, I got a ride to my Aunt Wanda’s and then went on to Aunt Hannah’s to stayed. I only went home for visits after that night.

I don't remember ever having ask Mom or Dad if I could ever go and stay with one of my Aunt's or cousin I just walked away and come back when I got home sick, sometimes I would stay for a week or month depending on how things where at home, if things were bad I would leave and show up on someone's doorstep and they always let me stay, even Aunt Eloise and she lived in Ohio, Mom and Dad would fine out where I was at, because Dad would come and get me when they wanted me home, which wasn't often.

My Family: Chapter 41

You can imagine what sparse Christmases we had at my house, but the one which stands out is the one where I’m thirteen; I didn’t get any gifts that year.  Shirley was sixteen and she wanted a record player. Lucille was eleven and she wanted a set of telephone's which had a wire connected to them. You could go into another room and talk over them just like walkies talkies. Sonny  wanted a BB gun and I wanted a doll. Dad and Mom went in to Logan that year. They told Shirley to watch us and if we were good; they would bring us back something. I begged Mom to please bring me back a doll, I wanted nothing else. She said I was too old dolls but she would think about getting me one. I prayed all that day, December 24,1954. “Please God, let them bring me back a doll.”

When they returned, they gave Shirley a record player with a couple of records, they gave Sonny a BB gun, Ronnie got some toy cars and a red wagon, and Bonnie was given some baby toys.  Lucille and I are still waiting for our gifts.  There was a bath house connected to our house and Mom told Lucille to go out there and bring in this big box. She told Lucille everything in the box was for her - in the box is a doll, the toy telephone, a set of dishes, and a lot more that I don't remember now. It’s the only Christmas my sister, Lucille, remembers because she got a lot of toys. After awhile, I realized they got me nothing! I felt hurt and I screamed and cried as I watched as the rest played with their toys. Lucille and I talked about that Christmas after we grew up and had families of our own; we couldn't understand how our parents could forget me. I know they did truly forget me because when Mom realized they didn’t have a gift for me, you could see she felt sorry and bad about it. She said I was too big for a doll anyway, and it was too late to go to the store and get me something. Besides they didn’t have any money left, they spent it all on whiskey. She said I could share Shirley’s record player.  Yeah, right. Here’s a girl who wouldn’t let me touch anything that belong to her and she’s going to share - I don’t think so! 

The next morning, I went to see what my friends got for Christmas. Two of my friends got Christmas stockings with fruit and candy, and my second cousin got a Shirley Temple doll which her mother (my first cousin who is the same age as my parents) never let her play with it. I would go to her house when her parents were not home and we would go open the clothes press and take the doll out to look at it then we would put it back. I asked my cousin what happen to the doll years after we grew up and she said that she didn't know.

Mom, Grandma Hattie, Aunt Alice, Aunt Tince

Later, our next door neighbor went to Logan and brought me back a doll. I hung the doll on Grandma’s wall and forgot about it. By the time I thought about the doll it was gone.  

My Family: Chapter 37

My girlfriend had a male cousin who would visit them from the North. He’d go into Logan and pick up women then bring them back to her house where they would stay until the cousin got tired of them. This one night, my girlfriend and I were on her back porch and the window to one of the bedrooms was open. We could hear a woman in there with him, they were arguing. He tried to get her into bed with him but she didn’t want to go. I decided to take a peek through the curtains to see who the woman was when I saw that it was my mother! She was so drunk she could hardly stand up! I went through the window so fast they didn’t realize I was in the room until I had dragged Mom out of it.  I continued to drag her out of the house, scolding her all the way. The girlfriend’s cousin followed us, cussing and hollering at me all the way. He told me Mom owed him because she drank all his whiskey up. Finally, he grabbed a hold of one her arms and I had the other. We were fighting over her. I called him all the bad cuss words I knew while he called me bad cuss words. Then when he seen I wasn’t going to give her up, he hit me with his fist in the face. There we were on the side of the road with everyone in the hollow watching us fight over my mother when I spotted my cousin. I hollered for her to go and get her dad’s shot gun because I decided to kill him. She, however, was too afraid to get the gun. I would have shot him and she knew it. The man let mom go and ran back into the house as soon as I hollered for a gun. I yelled to him I would be back with my dad and he would kill him for me.  

My mom weight next to nothing as I dragged her home but she kept falling down so I had to pick her up and carry her - about ten houses above my girlfriend’s house. That was the first time I ever saw my mom visit my girlfriend’s house - she always could smell whiskey a mile away. Dad wasn’t home when we got there. We were sitting on the front porch when he finally came home with a bushel basket of corn - he had been out with friends stealing it. It took so long for him to come home I had calmed down and changed my mind about telling him about the man hitting me. But Mom didn’t know this and she knew if I told Dad where she had been then she would be in trouble. So as soon as Dad sat the basket down on the steps, she told him about the man hitting me. This pull the attention away from her and put it on me. Dad got real mad, he checked to make sure he had his knife on him and then we all went down to my friend’s house (my dad wasn’t drunk). 

My girlfriend’s mom grabbed me and held me back as soon as we barged through the door - Dad hadn’t knocked. She begged me to tell Dad I had lied and the cousin hadn’t hit me; she didn’t want anyone to get hurt in front of her small children. I ran outside to the back porch where the cousin had gone when he heard us come in the house. Dad had him by the front of his shirt and he was denying he hit me. I stepped in and told Dad I lied that he hadn’t hit me. My girlfriend’s mother was also pleading with Dad; saying she was had been there the whole time and hadn’t seen him hit me. Dad told the cousin he was lucky this time but if he ever found out that he really did hit me he would be back. No one ever hits his girls. The cousin was gone the next day.

My Family: Chapter 31

Alone the railroad tracks in back of house

Shirley thought that if Dad hadn’t stop to talk to her as he went through the house to the back porch that Mom and Dad would have come face to face. As it was we followed Dad around the house and to watched him shoot at Mom. She was heading up the railroad tracks. Mom had made it about four houses up the along the tracks when Dad took aim and fired the shotgun. He shot at her twice and missed both shots. Mom fell as she got off of the tracks. We were sure Dad thought he killed her. We stood on the back porch and watched as he went up to the tracks and looked for her in the tall grass. Mom said later that it was her falling that saved her life. She had lain there until he stopped shooting then she got up and ran again. She said she heard the bullet pass right over her head.

And Mom did come back about two weeks later and, boy, did she come back drunk and mad. Our bed was up against a window and, in the middle of the night, she woke all of us by breaking every windowpane in the house with her fist. As she did so, she yelled for Dad to open the door and give her the babies, Bonnie and Ronnie. Dad came into our room, took Bonnie and Ronnie out of bed. Mom then changed tactics and yelled for one of us to let her in the house. As Dad left the room he dared any of us let her in the house then ran out the front door while Mom broke the glass out of the back door. Later we found out that he took Bonnie and Ronnie four houses above ours to the neighbor's house.

She finally broke the window out of the back door,  unlock it, and came to our room after going into Dad’s first. We had glass all over our bed because she broke every pane of glass in the window beside our bed. My girlfriend was sleeping over at time, too. Mom asked all of us why we didn't unlock the door for her. We told her  Dad told us not to. She then asked where he went and we when told her we didn't know so she left and we went back to sleep.

We didn't see her again for a month. Dad had all the glass put back in the house, I really don't know what excuse he gave the Company for them being broken. Dad went and got Mom to come back home. She said he told her he was starving to death. She made him get rid of all his guns first, but nothing changed; they still got drunk and fought every weekend. And Mom was still seeing Bert.

Shirley and I worked at Bert’s hotdog stand during the summer and sold hotdogs and ice cream. I remember once a  guy stopped by and asked me to make him a milkshake. I told him I didn’t know how, I had never heard of a milkshake before. He told me how to make it.

Bert eventually ended up back in prison for killing a man at the hotdog stand. I believe it had something to do with Mom and Dad. I don’t know the whole story, I was very sick in bed. Mom told me the deputy’s had been to the house and had search it. They even looked under my bed while I was sleeping with my mouth open (now to a thirteen year old this is terrible news, especially since I also had the slop jar under my side of the bed). Mom said Bert had killed a man last night and they believe he was hiding in the mountains. But Bert gave himself up and went to prison. He got out of prison about ten years later, he died about a year after he was home.

My Family: Chapter 30

Dad found out about Bert. He came home one Sunday and Mom was at church. He asked us a lot of questions and we would never lie to him. He would kill us if we did. Lucille got very upset and afraid under his questioning. So, she told him she’d seen Bert and Mom hugging while she was suppose to be asleep in the back seat of the car when Bert was driving her and Mom home from church.
 
When Bert finally dropped Mom off at home after church, Dad was waiting on the front porch with a shotgun. Before she even got out of the car, he took aim and was going to shoot her. I was standing behind him and just as he raised the gun,I reached for his arm and pulled it down. All the kids were crying and upset. Mom had just gotten one leg out of the car when she looked up and had seen Dad with the gun. She slammed the car door quick, Bert and her took off. Dad left the house after that and we didn’t see him until the next day. 

Mom had no where to go. Her mother was in Kentucky, living with her brother and taking care of his wife who was dying. Grandma Francis told me much later that Mom had come to Kentucky to ask to stay with her, but Grandma Francis told Mom she could stay only one night then she would have to leave. My guess is she went to stay with her uncle, Bert’s parents, who also lived in Kentucky. 
 
Mom came home one day while Shirley was at the store and stole Bonnie Sue. Dad was mad at Shirley; as if she could have stopped Mom from taking her baby. Mom took Bonnie to Aunt Belvia’s and left her there. When Dad found out he went to Aunt Belva’s and got her back.

Mom sued Dad for a divorce and was at the house when they delivered the papers. Dad’s niece, Sue, was also at our house at the same time. She and Mom sat in the kitchen talking and joking about what Dad would do when he came home and saw the papers. They guessed Dad would just try and shoot Mom again. They both laughed at this and by the time Dad came home from work Sue had left.  

When Dad saw Mom at the table, he asked Mom where his shotgun was and to get it for him, so she went and got it for him. He then told Shirley and I to take the babies and leave the house. Shirley said no and picked up Bonnie. Mom took off running out the kitchen door and Dad told Shirley again to get the baby and go. Shirley still said no. She told him if he was going to kill her mother, she’s going to watch and be a witness. Dad realized that Shirley wasn’t going to leave so he took off out the kitchen door after Mom. 

Shirley and I followed right behind Dad. I had Ronnie by the hand and Lucille was beside me while Shirley still had Bonnie. We had just skidded out into the yard when we spotted her. Mom had gone around the backside of the house and was running up the railroad tracks. Dad lifted the gun to his shoulder and took aim.

My Family: Chapter 29

Mom never tried to hide her affairs from us. She had a boyfriend who lived in Dabney below us. He was a miner and drove the coal truck so he had to pass our house every day. He dumped the slate up on the mountain. He’d come and see her every morning between 7:00 and 7:30am after Dad went to work. He’d was there when we got up to go to school. Mom and him stayed out in the bathhouse because he never came into the house. 

One day he just stopped coming to the house. I guess his wife found out and put a stop to it. Mom started messing around with her first cousin, Bert. He and Mom met in church, of all places. Bert was just released from prison for murder and had come to live at Lyburn where his ex-wife and son lived. He just wanted to be close to his son. Bert opened a hot dog stand next to the Lyburn Church. Mom, Shirley, and I would catch the church bus which would pick us up in front of our house and go to church. After church, we would all go over to Bert’s hot dog stand, he would then drive us home. Shirley and I weren’t stupid, we knew Bert and Mom were messing around. 

Dad had his girlfriends, as well. One time, he and I were in Logan together and a woman came up to us and yelled at Dad. She look as if she was going to hit me. Dad stepped between us and told her I was his daughter. She couldn’t be nice enough to me than. Dad asked me not to say anything to Mom and I never did. I forgot about it. I never even told Shirley.

Mom and Dad had their “harmless” affairs, until one day when Dad found out about Bert.

My Family: Chapter 15

Dad had many work accidents at the coal mines and the Company would pay him monetary compensation for each accident or injury he suffered. Remember, my parents are very poor and most times didn't have the money to have the basic necessities of life, so when they got money they really enjoyed themselves. There was no thought to save any of it or to buy me a bicycle to ride to school so I wouldn’t have to walk.

One time they got a thousand dollars, I remember how excited they were when they opened the letter - it was compensation from when Dad got his neck broken.

Niece Mary Jo, Mom and Dad

This was a lot a money back then in West Virginia. You could buy a house for a couple of hundred dollars. Dad went on a fishing trip to North Carolina and Mom took us girls to Logan to stay with Grandma Dillow. While we were there Aunt Hannah and Mom took us to a Carnival.  We went to the movies with a stage show which featured a fortune teller. Out of all the people in the theater he chose Mom to tell her fortune - we were sitting in the middle, half way from the front of the stage. The fortune teller knew things about Mom which he couldn't have known unless he knew her well. He even knew Dad was away on a fishing trip in North Carolina.

I also remember going to the movies with Mom, Aunt Eloise, Aunt Hannah to see An Imitation of Life.  It was such a sad movie and I tired not to cry but the more I tired not to cry the harder I cried. I was afraid Mom wouldn’t take me with her any more if I embarrassed her by crying.

Aunt Wanda, Aunt Hannah, Niece Poodie and Aunt Eloise

The more my parents drank the worse things got, after awhile they spent all their money on beer and whiskey. All of Mom’s jewelry got sold or traded for drink and you might not believe it but she had some expensive things such as a diamond watch, a necklace set, and several rings.  Like once, after receiving a compensation check, my parents went to visit his niece who lived in Detroit and Mom bought a fur coat. The first time I ever saw her put on makeup was when Mom would wear her fur coat. I only saw her wear it a few times.  Just think what we could have had if they never drank. They could have bought a home, or a car, or we could have had plenty to eat, or clothes to wear, and they would have lived longer. My parents would have gotten my Dad's $60,000 compensation for Black Lung. When the law passed in 1970’s that all miners and widows received the money.  I lost my dad at the age of 49 to double pneumonia, and my Mom only one year later at the age of 48 to a heart attack.

Wilbur Dillo and Marie Francis,taken right after they said their vows

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 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)