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.