My Family: Chapter 55

My first crush was on a guy 13 years older than myself. I didn't think I was ever going to fall in love. He lived a cross the street from Aunt Hannah and would come over to talk to Uncle Andy. I didn't pay him any attention until one day Aunt Wanda and Uncle Andy told me he was only coming over to the house to see me, so I started to pay attention to him.  I could see his house from my bedroom I had at Aunt Hannah’s.

But he had a girlfriend who lived in the apartments and he took her out on a date every day. I would watch him leave to pick her up and still be watching his house from my window, while lying on my bed, when he came home. He was twenty-seven and I was fifteen. All we every said to one another was hello.

Aunt Wanda lived in the apartment over the dance hall, and I could see the apartment building where his girlfriend lived and sometimes I would be at Aunt Wanda's when he dropped her off at home and start back up the alley. Aunt Wanda and I would race down the steps and sit on the bottom step pretending we were there the whole time as he passed by. He would stop and talk to us for a few minutes.  After he left, I would  be in seventh heaven for the rest of the night. It wasn’t to be because one day he moved to Ohio.

Here’s the story of how I gave Shirley’s wedding dress away. Remember she was dating Dave? Well, they decided to get married. I was living with Aunt Hannah at the time but I would go home for short visits.  While at Aunt Hannah’s, I met a girl who was around my age and lived down the alley. She needed a dress to wear to an event - I don't remember where she was going - but I told her I had a dress she could have. I hardly ever wore the dress because my parent’s neighbor bought it for me when I sang on the radio with the class. That was the only time I believe I wore it. 

However, I forgot the dress was no longer mine it was now Shirley’s. Shirley made me give it to her either because she did my dishes for me or because she didn’t go to the movies with me. Anyway I didn't know it but Shirley was going to wear the dress when she got married which just so happened to be the same weekend I gave it to my new friend to wear. Shirley was desperate, she had no wedding dress and I believe Dave’s sister either brought her a dress or loan her one. If she knew where I was (I moved frequently) she could have come and I would have gotten the dress back for her.  

My Family: Chapter 44

When we were teens, I would sit at the kitchen table and watch Shirley pluck her eyebrows. This one day I asked her if it hurt and she said at first it hurt it did but not now that she was used to it. Of course, I begged her to do mine and she warned me it would hurt but I said I could stand it. I was tough.  Well when she pulled one hair, I screamed; she laughed and told me she knew take the pain. Never again did I or anyone else ever pluck my eyebrows. Shirley also sat at the kitchen table and draw dress designs, I could sit and watch her for hours. Sometimes, we would go into Logan and buy leg make-up; the kind you put on your legs to make it look like you have a suntan, but we would put it on our face as make-up instead - it work the same.

Because of my parent’s partying on the weekends, my neighbors in the hollow thought I was fast and easy. When my girlfriend and I would go into the Company store, we were sometimes treated to string of catcalls and teasing.  One woman even said to me she saw me lying on the green (a section of grass up the mountain where we took a lot of pictures) with a boy. After several times like this, my girlfriend and I made up a story of what we were going to say if they teased me again. As we went through the door my friend waits until I get a little ways from her and hollers to me, “Poodie, wasn’t that you I seen in green bottom.”  And I holler back, “No, I thought that was you.” We left the store laughing thinking that the joke was on them when really the joke was on us. We were giving ourselves bad names. 

My Family: Chapter 43

For all the grief I thought Shirley gave me while growing up: not sharing her shoes, beating me up, and telling on me; she did save my life once.

I loved going to the movies, but I was never allowed to go alone, Shirley always had to go with me. When we went to the movies there always seem to be a few boys and girls walking home which was about four miles. I would laugh and have fun with the boys and Shirley would be walking a paces behind me and the other girls saying she was going to tell on me but I knew she wouldn't.

This one time a boy drove by us and asked all of us if we wanted a ride. He had two other boys in the car with him. The group of kids we’re with consisted of five girls and about four or five boys. Everybody said yes including myself.  Shirley refuses. The driver said he would take us all home but first he had to go into Dehue first to drop off the boys he had in the car. After the my group climbs aboard, it was overflowing with teenagers; on the hood, the running board, and  inside the car there was four up front with some boys sitting on the windows with half of their bodies sticking out.

Shirley wouldn't let me get in the car no matter how much we all beg her, her excuse was the car was too full and the driver was going to have an accident. They left without us and in the pitch dark we walked home with me fussing the whole way. By the time we got in front of our house, we met some of our friends who said the driver had an accident before they got to Dehue and some of the kids had to go to the hospital in Logan. All Shirley would say was “I told you so.”  I humbly agreed.

My Family: Chapter 42

There was a curb at the end of our row of houses and it was out of sight of our house and

The Dillo home in Hutchinson

that was as far as we would let any boy walk us home.  In the summer time, we would have a traveling caravel and a traveling roller rink come up the hollow - not at the same time. The roller rink would stay for at least two months, so we did a lot of skating. I would get away from Shirley while she was skating - I would do my thing. One day, I was not skating  while she was, three boys came by and asked me if I wanted to go for a ride, I agreed. I was sitting on one boy's lap with my back against the door and my legs on the other two. I always wore my hair in a ponytail.  We drove by the roller rink real fast. I don't know how fast we were going, but Shirley said we were doing at least 90 mph. We were laughing so hard I didn't notice Shirley standing on the side of road watching us. She turned to one of the other girls and asks who those fools were. One girl told her I was in the car. When we pulled in at the roller rink and stopped, Shirley grabbed the car door, jerks it open and got hold of my ponytail. She dragged me out of that car and we had a fight right there in front of everyone. Of course, the boys jumped in and told her to let me alone. They yelled to “give her nickel and send her home” but all she would say was she was going to tell on me this time for sure.  Shirley never did like anything me and my girlfriends thought was fun and the boys would always ask why she had to come along. They stopped asking this after awhile because Shirley got older, had more fun, and got to know all the young people in the hollow - she knew more teenagers than I did. I don’t know or remember any of them because I didn't spend my summers at home. Shirley told me the driver of that car was a boy that liked her and she didn’t like him.  He had been mad at her so that was why he asked me to get in the car. You know, I didn’t realize she had any boys that liked her but Dave and Chuck.

For all his faults, Dad would give you the shirt off his back and he always stood for the little guy. Once he was checking up on Shirley and I at the roller rink when I heard him say to some guy, “why don’t you pick on someone your own size.” There he stood having words with a guy who was picking on a smaller guy. When Dad interfered, the big guy walked away and the smaller guy thanked Dad and then he walked away. I went over and told Dad he embarrassed me fighting. He said that it was an unfair fight because one guy was bigger than the other; Dad had been drinking so I walked away. When I looked again, he was gone. Dad was always fighting. The guys would tell me that they seen my father throw some guy out of the Beer Garden window, they would be laughing while telling me but  I didn’t think it was funny. My dad was not all that large himself. He was about five feet eight inches tall and weighted one hundred and sixty pounds, but he acted like he was ten feet tall.

Once, I went to the Beer Garden with Dad and left him sitting at a table. He was slowly getting drunk and I went to get a pop. The person behind the bar was looking at me funny and I knew something was wrong. I turned around and saw Dad was having a fist fight with another customer. I got so upset I jumped in the middle of them, they stopped fighting, and we left. I never went in a public place with Dad again.

My Family: Chapter 40

Dad Wilbur Dillo sitting on back porch sleeping

One night, Aunt Hannah and I were at her kitchen table talking when we hear the door open onto the porch and in walked my Dad.  He was stinking drunk and hollering at the top of his lungs for me.  I quickly got up out of my chair and went to stand by Aunt Hannah. When he staggered into the kitchen, Aunt Hannah asked him what he was doing all the way in Man.  He said he just got finished beating Shirley for lying to him and came to beat me; he was sure there was something I needed to get a whopping for.  Aunt Hannah told him he was crazy and to go home; he wasn’t going to beat me for no reason.  He stayed and talked to Aunt Hannah until he sober up a little bit then he left with a parting shot for me to stay out of trouble.

I went home the next day to see how bad he had beat Shirley. It had been about six months since I had been home.  When I got there I saw that Shirley was a mess; she had two black eyes and bruises all over. Shirley had all her teeth pulled since the last time I saw her which just made her look worse. I asked her what made her lie to Dad when she knew he would have killed us for lying. She said she didn't lie, he just misunderstood her. She went to the rolling rink with a girlfriend and her boyfriend, Tick. When she got home, Dad asked her where she’s been and who she was with. She told him and the next night when Dad ran into another friend with the same sounding name, Tack. Dad asked him why Tack was keeping his daughter out so late. Confused, Tack said he wasn’t; that he hasn’t seen Shirley for a couple of days. That's when Dad went straight home and beat her for lying. I left and went back to Aunt Hannah's where it as safe.

The next time I came home, Shirley was back to being her beautiful self only this time she had one too many boyfriends.  She was in love with this boy, Chuck, who lived farther up the hollow. I think they had talked about marriage. Chuck was in the Army and he would visit on weekends.  He had been seriously thinking of going A.W.O.L. but Shirley talked him into going back. Meantime, Shirley met Dave, and he asked her to marry him. Shirley and I (I had just gotten home from one of my aunt’s, I don't remember which one) were in Mom and Dad’s bedroom talking, while Chuck sat in the kitchen drinking Moonshine with the house full of people. Shirley explained to  me; who Chuck was, why he was there, about Dave, and how she was in love with two boys. Chuck had just gotten discharged out of the Army because he had developed a heart condition. He hadn't gone home yet and Shirley had been trying to get him to go home. We heard a commotion out in the kitchen and when we peeked into the room, we saw Dave in the house. He took one look at Chuck, turned around, and walked back out. Shirley asked me what should she do, and I told her if she wanted Dave she should to climb out of the window and go after him but she better hurry before he got away, however, if she loved Chuck more all she had to do was go into the kitchen.

Shirley climbed out the bedroom window and after awhile  Chuck left to go someone else house where he drank even more Moonshine. He didn't go home until the next morning where he got into a fight with his dad. Apparently, his dad hit him in the chest and his heart busted; he died instantly. Shirley went to Chuck’s funeral and his mother blame her because she thought Shirley treated Chuck badly. Shirley really loved Chuck but he liked to drink - I think she picked the better of the two.

My Family: Chapter 23

By the time Shirley was 15 years old, Mom had joined Dad in drinking again. Now both of them would go away on the weekends and leave Shirley home to watch Lucille, Bonnie, Ronnie and me. Dad thought since Sonny was an older boy he didn't need watching. This meant we had no one to tell us what to do from Friday night to Sunday. Sometimes we would look up and there in the doorway was Dad. He’d slipped home to see if he could catch us and if we were staying home like he told us to. We couldn’t go anywhere or do anything, so we stayed home all weekend. Plus, there wasn’t anything for us to do on the weekends and no boys were ever allowed at our house - not even Sonny could bring friends home. 

Because we couldn’t go out on the weekends, we got in trouble during the week since that’s when everything happened anyway. This one time my girlfriend, Shirley, and I went to the caravel in Logan and saw belly dancers. My friend and I couldn’t wait to see them dance but we were too young to buy tickets, so we hatched a plan to crawl under the tent, however, we couldn’t talk Shirley into it. So as soon as Shirley turned her back, my friend and I lifted the tent and crawled underneath. We watched the whole show - it was great. That same night, I met a boy (I thought he told me his name was Dick) who lived in Logan over in Black Bottom. We tried to get rid of him but we couldn’t so we went with him to meet his mother. I think she was a “lady of the night” because she looked just like one of the belly dancers. She made a big fuss over me when he introduced me as his girlfriend. I told him (Shirley did as well) that I wasn’t allowed to have boyfriends and he couldn’t come to see me at my house ever! I was fourteen at the time. 

He didn’t listen because showed up at my house not too long after. We were all in the living room watching TV when all of a sudden Dad said, “Who are you?” everyone turned and look there was Dick sitting in a chair! He told Dad he was here to see me. I was sitting on the floor out of sight  next to the stove and when I saw who it was, I ducked under the stovepipe then disappeared into the kitchen real fast. Dad asked him who let him in, and Dick said some boy did. Dad told him to leave because his girls weren’t allow to bring boys in the house or to be dating them. When he came through the kitchen to leave, I yelled at him for getting me in trouble and not to come back. It didn’t dawn on me but he had a twenty-five mile walk to go home. Dad called Sonny and me back into the living room where I explained I didn’t know he was going to come to the house. I also explained how we met. Sonny said that he was on his way out the door when he met Dick at the door. He asked for me so Sonny let him in, got him a kitchen chair,and sat it in the living room for him. The whole family had a laugh because we didn’t notice him sitting in the chair. Dick had been there for some time before Dad noticed him. 

That boy always seemed to find me no matter where I was. He came up to Man to Aunt Hannah’s house where I was helping her with her boys - it had been more than a year since the incident at my house. I had forgotten all about him and then one day there he is on the doorstep. I asked him how he found me. After the incident at my house, I had lived in Logan with Aunt Wanda which was almost in his back yard and never once saw him. He said he gone up to Macbeth, asked about me, and someone told him where I was. He had only been waiting until I got old enough to date. I told him that I didn’t want to date him. That’s when he asked me why I called him Dick, I said it was because that’s his name, he said his name was Butch. I asked why he let me call him Dick, he said he didn’t know why. I had a glass of soda in my hand and I threw it in his face. God, did I feel sorry for him because I thought he was going to cry. I hugged him and told him how sorry I was but he should’ve told me I had his name wrong. I told him to go away and don’t ever come back. He was a good-looking boy, about eighteen at the time, and I never saw him again. Shirley said that’s why I didn’t have any boyfriends because of my mouth.

My Family: Chapter 17

My parents had only girls which is why Dad took in both Sonny and Ronnie.  When my youngest sister, Bonnie Sue, was born in 1953; Shirley was fifteen, I was twelve, and Lucille had just turned ten. Bonnie was the most beautiful baby we every saw.  Mom said she always had beautiful babies, people came from miles to see them.  Well, I do know that Dad's niece, who was the same age as Mom, came every day to the house to see Bonnie.  She would make a fuss over the baby always telling us she hoped her baby (she was pregnant at the time) looked just like Bonnie. My cousin already had six children; five boys and one girl.  Two of the boys were older than us and the girl was in between Lucille and me, her last three babies had all been boys.  She got her wish and delivered a little girl who looked enough like Bonnie to be twins. My father always said he would rather have had ten boys then three girls - he didn't count the baby; he only counted the ones who were interested in boys. Shirley was the quiet one and didn't go out of the house much, so Dad trusted her not to mess around with boys. He also trusted her to watch me and make sure I didn’t get in trouble.

Everyone who saw Bonnie loved her.  I was doing some odd household jobs for a lady (I'll call her Anne) in the holler and wanted to show her how pretty Bonnie Sue was.  So one day, without Mom knowing it, I took Bonnie to her house. While Anne played with the baby on the porch, I did her dishes. Bonnie was about seven months old and can sit by herself.  Everything was fine until I tried to leave.  See, I stayed for a little while after I finished the dishes to give Anne more time to play with Bonnie, but when I told her to give me the baby we had to leave, Anne refused and told me I couldn’t have her baby. I told her it wasn't her baby and she had to give me the baby back. Of course, now I’m scared.  Mom was going to kill me if I came home without her baby.

I did the only thing I could, I grabbed Bonnie and ran as fast as I could for home. Anne was right behind me yelling for me to give back her baby. I skidded into our yard and slammed the fence gate closed. Anne stopped at the fence and never came into the yard. She just stood out there screaming and cussing.  Finally, Mom went outside and told her to go home. But Anne just stood outside the fence raving we had her baby and she wanted her back. Mom came back into the house and told me to go out there and tell that crazy woman to home before somebody got hurt. I liked Anne and this wasn't the first time I had problems with her.  So, I went outside and gently told her again that the baby wasn't hers and to go before her husband came home. She left but not without some cussing. Later the same day, Mom had to walk past Anne's house to go to the company store. Mom told me later Anne had followed her all way to the store cussing. Mom threatened me that if I ever take her baby down to Anne's house again, she would beat me.

We found out Anne's husband had to send her to the hospital. Apparently, he sent her away because she had become dangerous.

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 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 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.