I guess the best place to start this story is at
the beginning, right? Well it all started in a little coal mining town
named Fall River, West Virginia, in McDowell County. The towns were known
best as “Coal Camps” Fall River doesn’t exist today, it has long since been
absorbed by the town of Roderfield. The date was 3 June, 1918, I was born
at home, delivered by Doctor Herman Tutwiler who was the company doctor.
I believe that every baby boy delivered by Doctor Tutwiler was named Herman.
I knew at least eight boys named Herman and there were four in my class
in school. I was the first boy in the family of five children.
Noah and Laura Smith
It may be helpful to describe the camp and its demography. There were
probably 50 to 75 houses in the camp, housing about 175 people. The mine
employed approximately 75 to 100 miners of which, about 30 were foreign
born or black The Company had the mine and the town pretty well organized
and was fairly well self-sufficient. There was a well-stocked company store
that sold everything from shoes to beefsteak. Each morning, the wives or
older children would go to the company store to do their daily shopping.
Each one had a “script card” which enabled them to draw script that could
be exchanged over the counter in the store the same as cash. The amount of
script drawn was debited against the miner’s wages and deducted from his pay.
On pay-days, if the miner had anything left, there would likely be a shopping
trip to Roderfield or catch the train to Welch for some big time shopping.
There was a theater which had a movie, comedy and a serial on Saturday nights.
How well do I remember Tom Mix, Buck Jones, Ken Maynard and Harry Cary as
my favorite cowboys and “Perils of Pauline,” as my favorite serial. Harold
Lloyd and Charlie Chaplain were big-time comedians. The projector was the
carbon arc-type, which made the characters a little shaky and jerky
at times but what the heck, we enjoyed them as much or more than modern movies.
We also had other forms of recreation, such as fights with the colored folks.
There was intense segregation in those days and every time we caught the
colored people in our swimming hole, there was hell to pay. Sometimes we
won and sometimes we lost but in the end, it was settled until the next time.
Tug River circled around the back of the camp and so it furnished a lot of
pleasure for us. We swam, boated, and fished in the summer time and skated
on it in the winter.
Grammar school, primer through sixth grade was
located in Roderfield, about 2miles down the road. Junior High was about
6 miles in the opposite direction in Big Sandy. It sure was tough on the
small kids wading up to 2 feet of snow to get to school in the winter time
and go to school we did. There was no such thing as a snow day for us.
We went to school and were spanked if we were late. High School was located
in Welch, 15 miles up Tug River and by golly, they operated a school bus
to it.
The house in which I was born is still standing
today and in pretty good shape, too. We probably lived there about a year
and then moved to Roderfield. The little old house that we moved into, wasn’t
much better than a shack. It had 3 rooms with a porch all the way across
the front. I well remember waking in the middle of the night by dogs barking
in the distance and the weird noises made by a bunch of guineas that mom
had. Seems as if I stayed half-scared to death so long as we lived there.
Herbert was born in this house on September 23, 1920. We probably lived
here about a year when dad decided to move to Kentucky which turned out
to be a big mistake. Marie was born on April 21, 1923 while we lived at
TeeJay, Kentucky.
There were a couple of things that happened to
me while we lived at TeeJay that may be worthy of mentioning because I
may well not have been here today had things turned out a wee might differently.
A group of older boys had obtained a 50 pound carbide can some where and
it had about 2 pounds of carbide left in the can. The big boys punched a
nail hole in the back of the can, set a tomato can full of water in it, screwed
the lid on tightly and pointed it across the river. The trick was to roll
the big can over a little to wet the carbide, put a flame of some sort to
the nail hole and run. Do you know what happens when water and carbide are
mixed? Acetylene gas happens which is highly explosive. One can guess very
accurately what happened when I stuck a lighted piece of paper to that nail
hole. That can exploded and blew that lid into the next county and the can
passed me somehow and landed about 200 feet in the opposite direction. It
knocked me about 10 feet away with only a loud ringing in my ears as a result.
Talk about luck and The Good Lord looking out for someone, it took both
for me to walk away from that caper.
On another occasion, this 5-year old found himself
in another awkward and dangerous situation. This may well have happened
when Floyd and Obra were on their way to get married. Floyd had driven
a buggy pulled by old Jim Bob, across the ford in the Cumberland River
to pick up Obra. When they pulled out of the yard, they didn’t know they
had a hitch-hiker hanging on the back of that buggy. The ford was very shallow
and rocky. Well, about half way across the river, I had about as much bouncing
around from my narrow perch as I could stand and I was thrown off. I landed
on my back and my head hit a big rock. Floyd and Obra were not aware of
the situation that I was in and I think it was again, a miracle of God that
I wasn’t knocked unconscious and drown.
The third incident that seemed to prove that I
was the luckiest kid alive, happened when we were moving into our new
house in TeeJay. The moving men carried the bottom half of our kitchen
cabinet into the kitchen and set it up against the wall. Then they brought
the top half in and placed it on top of the bottom half and didn’t bother
to screw the two together at that particular moment. The top half was filled
with jars of jelly and jam that mom had canned at Varilla. There was a young’un
in the household with nothing to do but explore, plunder, or whatever he
could get into. A chair was pulled up close to the kitchen cabinet and I
proceeded to climb up to get me some sweet stuff. I made a big mistake when
I reached up to pull myself closer to the jelly. The result….I pulled the
whole top of that cabinet over on me and cabinet, jelly, jam and broken glass
all over the kitchen floor was the result. Don’t know why it didn’t mess
me up pretty bad, but I only had a cut in my head at my hair- line and I
still have the scar to this day.
Believe me when I say I was glad that mom and dad
decided they had better get the heck out of Kentucky before they had a
funeral bill to pay. In a short while, we were back in Fall River, West
Virginia.
I must have been six years old about this time
and started school. The first year of school was called the Primer. It
was a little more advanced than kindergarten is today. We learned our ABCs
and learned to read from our Primer. It was all about Baby Ray and his
little dog Penny and his two cunning kitty-cats. Our first day at school
was strictly one of familiarization. We were introduced to one another,
met our teachers, was read the riot act about things we could do and those
we had danged well better not do and most importantly, we obtained a list
of books and supplies that our parents had to purchase. There was no such
thing as the school furnishing books or supplies. Our grammar school had
big, double doors leading inside to the cloakrooms. This is where we hung
our coats and sweaters and there was a long shelf where we stored our lunches.
When the dentist made his annual visit, he set up his equipment in one of
the cloakrooms and we had to double up on the other one. The school house
had three large rooms, the small room where the Primer, first and second
grades were taught, the middle room housed the third and fourth grades and
the big room held the fifth and sixth grades. Each room had only one teacher.
When she was teaching one grade, the others were studying their assignments.
One hour was devoted to each class and believe me when I say we had darn
well be studying. Any talking or whispering would surely bring on a paddling.
School started at eight with a ten-minute break at ten to go to the outhouse
or get a drink of water, a half-hour lunch period at twelve and another break
at three and dismissed at four thirty. We took a year-end test to earn a
promotion. If we failed the test, we repeated that whole year, period. When
we successfully completed the sixth grade at Roderfield, we started Junior
High School at Big Sandy. I dearly loved school and all my teachers. I particularly
remember how sweet my third and fourth grade teacher was. Her name was Nellie
McCauley and she was the most patient person I’ve ever known. Mizz (now known
as Ms) Duncan was the Principal and taught fifth and sixth grades. I must
have done OK in school because I had completed the sixth grade before I was
eleven years old. Guess they promoted me to get rid of me. My grade school
house burned the next year and they built a new brick school about a half
mile from the old location.
The house we moved into when we came back from
Kentucky was a large six room duplex. We lived in three rooms and George
Walls and his family occupied the other three rooms. Looking back, I don’t
know how a family of eight could possibly crowd into three rooms. The
rooms were large enough to set up two beds in each room though, which made
it possible, I guess. Of course, one room was used for the combination kitchen-dining
room. We only lived in this house a couple of months, when a much larger and
better house across the road became available and we moved into it. It had
three bedrooms, a living room (which we called the front room), a kitchen
and separate dining room. We were living in high cotton, now.
My brother
and I were getting large enough to do chores and that didn’t go over too
well. It interfered greatly with our play schedule. Herbert was assigned
to carry in the coal and I was to gather the kindling to start the morning
fires. We had a Burnside, coal-burning space heater that looked like a boiler
and it really made short work of a pile of coal. Coal was only a dollar
a ton, delivered. A ton would last about a week in the wintertime. Besides,
there was the cook stove that had to be supplied, also.
Then there was wash day. Our sisters believed in washing everything
in the house, on Tuesday. We had a large Thor electric washing machine
that took two number two wash tubs full of water to fill. Then there were
two rinse tubs and a blueing tub. Can you imagine how much water it took
to wash our clothes? ONE -HUNDRED and FIFTY GALLONS of water each week.
We carried this water from a pump about a hundred yards away in ten-quart
buckets. After a while, Herbert and I made us a big cart on which we placed
four tubs. I pulled and he pushed but too much water sloshed out to make
this venture pay off. I think the Company ran a water line down close to
our house that helped alleviate the problem. My sisters would shave
about two cakes of P&G soap into the washer and insert the clothes which
were tumbled inside a big rotating drum until the clothes were clean or torn
to shreds one or the other. Then they were run through two rinse tubs, then
through the blueing tub. I was in junior high school when I discovered the
secret of blueing. You see, the clothes had a yellowish tint to them because
of the soap and maybe a little lingering dirt. Now a mixture of yellow and
blue makes white, hence the clothes came out of the blueing, not blue, but
white. There was no such thing as clorox at that time. It came later and
eliminated the blueing process.
I previously mentioned the big Burnside heater that we had to keep
supplied with coal, but there was also the big Home Comfort kitchen range
that required a lot of coal, also. The range had four eyes on top which
could be removed with a “lid lifter” so we could stoke it with coal. Below
the coal bed were the grates which supported the burning coal. About
every half hour or so, we would have to insert a crank called the shaker,
on the grates and rock the shaker back and forth about six times to make
the ash fall down into the ash pit, which was a sort of a drawer that had
to be emptied frequently. On the right side of the stove was a water tank
that would hold about five gallons of water and it stayed hot all the time.
This water was used for bath water and washing dishes. There was a large
oven down below and a “warming closet” above the stove top. The warming
closet was used to keep leftovers hot. There were almost always a few biscuits
or cornbread, a couple of pork chops or sausage, and maybe some good old
milk gravy to be found in the closet. On the back of the stove top,
there was always a pot of coffee, hot and strong for the brave ones.
