The day George and I drowned

          George and I were watching TV the day we drowned so we missed out on all the excitement.

          Meanwhile, my parents were having more than enough excitement to go around.

          My cousin George Crice was a year or so younger, and we were together much of the time, playing, getting into things, fishing, and later hunting.

          His father was Dick Crice, one of mother’s brothers, and his mother was Oma Dell Garrett, one of the four children of Joe and Nola Garrett of Wickliffe. Oma Dell’s brothers were Clifford (better known as Wart) and Howard, and she had a sister, Rosie.

          George and I managed to fish in many of the ponds and creeks in the vicinity of where I grew up at the junction of what is now Highway 121 (I think it was numbered 440 back then) and the Old Blandville Road.

          On this particular day we decided to fish in a little creek a couple of miles down the Old Blandville Road. We were young enough that I’m guessing my mother drove us there.

          To get there, you drove toward Blandville, past Hub Copeland’s and Otto Beardsley’s farms, both on the left side of the road, and Albert Carpenter’s on down the road a way on the right side. Starting at the Carpenter farm, there was a long downhill drive. Hayner Beardsley (at least, that’s how we pronounced it but I think his given name probably was Hannah) and Anna Tufts lived in the house on the left at the bottom of the hill.

          Maybe a quarter of a mile farther on was a bridge over the creek we planned to fish in. The creek formed the property line of Leroy Dennis’ place, just past the bridge.

          It was a little creek, probably not more than a foot wide in some places, but two or three feet wide beneath the bridge where there was a little pool that might have been a foot or two deep.

          It wasn’t an impressive looking fishing hole but we had been there before and we usually managed to catch some creek perch and some small (five or six inches long) catfish.

          We caught some that day, too. It was a hot day, but it was shady under the bridge so we were doing okay.

          Then the rain came. Not just a little rain, but one of those West Kentucky gully washers.

          It rained and rained, but we were under the bridge so we weren’t getting wet.

          But then we noticed that water moccasins were beginning to be washed down the creek as the water began flowing faster, running down from the nearby hills.

          It was probably half an hour later that my mother – a born worrier, one who has the worry gene built in and therefore needs no formal training in worrying – decided she should drive down and pick us up.

          But she could get no farther than Anna Tuft’s house. Water was over the road that far back from the bridge.

          She and Anna waded through the deepening water, through the snakes and the debris and the jetsam and flotsam (I don’t know what jetsam and flotsam are, but I’ve seen the words in books about the ocean and here’s a chance to use them), all the way to the bridge. To hear mother tell the story, the water must have been about thigh-deep by then, but I doubt if it was much more than ankle deep.

          The bridge was under water. The poles we had been fishing with were dangling in the water, hooked onto a nearby fence.

          We were nowhere in sight.

          Anna went to her phone and called daddy, who at that time was working as a TV repairman in Bob Deckard’s shop in Cairo, Ill.

          “Oh J.D., you’ve got to come home! The boys have drowned!” she reported to my father, who surely was stricken to his heart by the tragic news.

          But…

          Young we may have been, but we were outdoorsmen or outdoorskids, and not particularly foolish about such things as rising water.

          When we saw the snakes drifting by we found a stick and marked the edge of the water. Within minutes, the water had swelled out well past the stick, so we knew we shouldn’t stay there.

          We discarded the cane poles and walked up the hill to Leroy Dennis’ house, where – even though we were drenched like the proverbial drownded rats (I know drownded isn’t a real word, but that’s how we said it and it sounds better than plain old drowned) – they let us in.

          We were sitting there watching TV while all the excitement was happening out by the bridge.

          I don’t remember how we hooked up with mother, and I don’t remember what happened after we did. Some things are best forgotten.

          But there was an aftermath to the story.

          I couldn’t find the little metal tackle box we always took fishing.

          Weeks later, the Dennis family kept noticing a really bad smell out in the shed. It was coming from my tackle box, which we must have left in the shed. We had caught several small fish that day, and we left them in the tackle box. Confined fish and hot Kentucky days aren’t a good combination.

          George died of cancer a year or two ago. I visited him at his daughter’s house in Michigan before he died and I told this story. George and I and the other folks in the house had a good laugh about it.

          At his funeral, his daughter Shanna asked me to tell the story again. I did. Now that I’ve added it to the “Stories & Memories,” I probably won’t tell it again.

George Crice and the Vultures

By Shanna Crice Waterman

(Note: Shana Waterman is one of the daughters of my cousin George Crice. George was about a year younger and we were very close growing up. He came down with cancer and lived out the remainder of his life with Shana and her family in Michigan. This story may seem a bit morbid, but I think it’s a reflection of how George faced imminent death with a stoic dignity in which he managed to retain his unique personality. My friend Eddie Faye and I got to visit with George near the end of his life, and except for the obvious physical deterioration of his body, he retained all the essential “Georgeness.”)

           I thought of a story I thought I'd share with you. It may sound kind of warped but a person who understood Dad’s sense of humor would appreciate this story.

          When Daddy was sick in the hospital before being diagnosed with the cancer, he had nothing better to do than sit in that bed and watch out the window from his room. He could tell you who came in and out all day long.

          When I got there one afternoon, he was not in his room. I looked around all over and couldn’t find him. I asked the nurse at the nurses’ station where he was, but she didn’t know.

          About that time while I was standing at the nurses’ station, I heard them discussing calling security to the men’s bathroom on that floor to check out someone possibly smoking in the men’s room.

          I knew right then where he was. I just knew that had to be him.

          Sure enough, I headed down that direction to catch him sneaking (literally) out of the restroom, gown unfastened in the back, sneaking back toward his room.

          I said, “What are you doing?”

          He just kind of giggled and kept hustling back to his room. I followed. As we got back in his room, he hurried and got back in bed, like nothing had happened.

          I said, “Were you smoking in the bathroom, Dad?”

          He said, “Yeah, I have been for the last few days, but I think I might have almost gotten busted this time!”

          Well, he did get busted, because here came that same nurse who had seen him sneaking down the hallway, unfastened gown and all.

          She said, “Mr. Crice, were you smoking in the bathroom just now?”

          He said, “Yes ma’am I was.”

          She explained to him how that was against all the rules and smoking was not allowed in the hospital at all and that he could get in serious trouble for that. But she said that since he was honest with her, she would not report who the mysterious smoker was as long as it did not happen again.

          We thanked her and she walked away.

          I said, “Dad, I can’t believe you were in the bathroom smoking.”

          He said, “Well I was getting depressed looking out that window all the time at those vultures, and not being able to smoke just made it worse.”

          I said, “What do vultures have to do with anything?”

          He said, “Well ever since I have been here there have been vultures flying around outside my window.”

          I said, “Okay, again what does that have to do with it?”

          He said, “Well I know they are waiting for me to lay down somewhere, so they can eat me.”

          I did not know whether to laugh or cry at this point, because he was serious.

          A couple of days later, as I was bringing him home from the hospital, again we saw vultures flying over a field. He said, “See, there they are again, they are waiting for me.”

          I told him to stop saying that. I told him they were not waiting for him.

          We got home and got settled. He went outside on the steps to smoke, and what did he see? More vultures.

          The more this happened, which was very often, it started becoming funny. It became quite the joke around here, about those vultures after him. And it seemed that every time he went outside there really were at least a couple gliding around.

          Even the kids would say, “Grandpa, the vultures are coming.”

          He would say, “I know.” He really thought they were waiting for him.

          So now every time we see a vulture, we think of Daddy. Maybe you can too.

It’s good for whatever stings you

          Here’s how to treat a yellowjacket sting: Take off running and yelling, go to the jail, get grandmother, … oops, forget that. Grandmother’s not there anymore.

          Oh well, there’s still a story to tell.

          My cousin George Crice and I spent lots of time together when we were kids, teenagers, and later as grown-ups.

          We were pretty typical small-town youngsters back in the ’50s, exploring every nook, cranny, shed, creek, thicket … well, if it was there, we explored it.

          We were curious and let our imaginations lead us. Mostly, we didn’t get into trouble. Wickliffe was a town of around 900 people, and everyone in town knew you. You weren’t just the child of your parents; in some ways, you were a child of the town. If you did something really wrong, someone saw you and either took action or reported to your parents and they took action.

          One of our favorite adventures was to creep up on a nest loaded with red wasps – waspers, George called them – throw a rock into the nest and then run like crazy to see if we could avoid getting stung. Mostly we did.

          There was a hill in Wickliffe behind the Vance store (and it also was behind my dad’s radio and TV store). Folks weren’t as protective of the environment in those days. Many of the businesses used the fairly steep hill as a place to throw junk.

          The Vance store sold groceries in the front part, and the back part was a feed store filled with sacks of livestock feed. The door at the side of the feed store was big enough for a pickup truck to back in and load up with feed.

          That door was usually open and Mr. Vance didn’t seem to mind if a couple of boys occasionally wandered in and lay down on a sack of feed, soaking up smells and dreams.

          Some memories are not of events or people, but of smells. The feed store is such a place. To a boy, at least, it was one of the most wonderful mixtures of smells in our small world.

          A tobacco store where they sell pipe tobacco and cigars is another of the places where the strongest memory is of the smells.

          The hill behind the store was an adventurous place. There was a narrow path that led all the way down – or up, depending on which way you were headed – to the creek at the bottom. There were trees on the hill, some with long thorns, some with grapevines growing up into their branches.

          George and I could be Indians or cowboys or land-locked pirates on that hill and that path. We could hide from large war parties of Apaches or platoons of enemy soldiers that were very real … at least they were real in our vivid imaginations.

          We played there often.

          I wasn’t with George on the day he got into a nest of yellowjackets on the hill.

          You probably know about yellowjackets. Keep your distance and they’ll leave you alone. Get too close to their nest in the ground, or stumble onto it and they’ll swarm you.

          When they swarm you, they don’t bestow gentle kisses lovingly upon you. Nope, they use the other end, the one that has the harpoon in it.

          So George had the misfortune of stumbling into the nest on a day I had the good fortune not to be with him.

          The squadron attacked him and he was pretty well covered with stings.

          George did the sensible thing. He took off running and yelling and swatting at the yellowjackets. He crossed the street, went up the hill, ran past the courthouse and up the steps to the jail, where grandmother was jailer.

          She knew exactly what to do to treat a boy covered with yellowjacket stings.

          She got out some tobacco – probably a twist of Beeswax because that was what she chewed – put a gob in her mouth and chewed it up to soften it.

          Then she plastered the soggy tobacco onto the stings.

          That was a time-honored treatment. May still be as far as I know.

          I don’t know if the tobacco does much for the stings, but it pretty well drives away friends and foes, and probably makes you forget the stings.

          If we got into a yellowjacket nest today, we’d probably go to the hospital or at least to a drug store and buy some pink medicine or some clear gel medicine to put on the stings. That may be effective but it’s not nearly as interesting as the chewing tobacco therapy.

 Tobacco juice and coal 

          I was 17 the first time I voted, and if my memory isn’t lying to me I voted for John F. Kennedy in the Democratic primary that year.

          Kentucky was one of the first states to let 18 year olds vote. If you would be 18 by the time of the general election you were allowed to vote in the primary when you were 17.

          Looking back, I probably wasn’t well enough informed to have been allowed to vote.

          At that time in Ballard County, the Democratic primary essentially was the election for local and county offices. I wasn’t even aware that there might have been such a thing as a Republican primary. I may not even have known at the time that what I was voting in was a primary, not an actual election.

          That’s due, at least in part I think, to the fact that my mother’s family were staunch Democrats as were most of the county’s residents. That seems to have changed now, and the county often votes for Republican candidates.

          My grandfather was one of the Crice boys, whose farm was located in an area between La Center, Bandana and Oscar.

          His brother, Van Crice, served as Ballard County sheriff for three terms starting in the late 1800s.

          My grandfather, Robert F. Crice, was elected to four terms as county jailer, starting in 1933. When he died in office, my grandmother, Lannie Crice, finished his term, serving as the first official jailer in Kentucky. Later in her life, a story about her in the Cairo Evening Citizen, which was at the time a daily newspaper just across the river from Kentucky in Southern Illinois, was headlined, “I spent the best years of my life in jail.”

          And then my uncle Billy Bob Crice, whose given name was Ernest Wells but he was always called Billy Bob, ran for county sheriff. During the campaign he was drafted into the Army but continued to run. He was elected to office while serving in Korea.

          Deputy B. Allie Hall ran the sheriff’s office until Billy Bob was discharged.

          During the jailer years, I and several of my cousins were at least partly raised at the county jail, which was a large residence with cells for the men at the back of the bottom floor and cells for women upstairs.

          I would sometimes get to go with my grandfather to the courthouse, where he served as custodian. At that time, there were lots of spittoons spread around the courthouse because many of the men chewed tobacco.

          Women did, too. I remember my grandmother would send me to George Williamson’s store to pick up a twist of Bees Wax chewing tobacco for her.

          The jailer’s job included cleaning spittoons, firing up the coal furnace in the courthouse basement, and mowing the large courthouse lawn. There were no gasoline mowers at that time. Mowing meant pushing one of those rotary blade muscle-propelled mowers.

          One of my most vivid memories from the time is of the big keys that locked and unlocked the jail cells. Wonder what it is about a big key that makes it that memorable?

          I hung around the sheriff’s office when Billy Bob came back from Korea.

          A highlight of that time was when the county purchased and installed its first ever radio system, with the home unit in the sheriff’s office and a car unit in Billy Bob’s car.

          My father had a radio and TV service in Wickliffe, and he put in the radio system.

          A police radio required an antenna, and daddy let me go with him and Billy Bob onto the roof of the courthouse to put up the antenna. At the time, that seemed like it must have been the tallest building in my small world, and being on its roof was both frightening and exciting.

          Like most folks when we get older, I find it puzzling to think back to the early years and wonder how time has passed so quickly. It can’t have been 50 or 60 years ago. But it was.

Daddy and Buddy Hughes Proved the Experts Wrong

          It was 1949, the war was over, and daddy and his good friend David Budd Hughes – better known as Buddy – decided they wanted to go into the TV business.

          Only problem was, the TV folks didn’t want to sell them any TVs.

          That was because the TV experts said the TV signal traveled only a certain distance. I think the distance was 100 miles, or it could have been 150. It probably had something to do with the curvature of the Earth and the notion that TV signals go in a straight line and don’t conform to curves. Or maybe it was something else.

          The closest stations were farther than that from Wickliffe.

          St. Louis and Memphis were about 180 miles away and both cities had TV stations, but they were too far away the experts said.

          But daddy and Buddy thought the experts were wrong and they set out to prove that they could receive TV signals in Wickliffe.

          That’s why they began building a TV tower in 1950.

          They decided to build it from wood using 8-foot sections of 2x2 lumber because that’s how they came from the lumber yard.

          The tower was located in the back of the little house my parents rented from Frances Hughes, behind the house she lived in. Fran was Buddy’s aunt.

          They nailed strategic cross-strips – Xs – inside the tower sections for strength.

          They would put a single section into place, climb up it and hoist the next section into place.

          They placed temporary steel guy wires as the tower became taller and then permanent ones as it was finished. When it was finished it was 80-foot tall, not much compared to the WPSD TV tower in a field behind my house at Monkey’s Eyebrow (it’s more than 1,600 feet tall) but extremely impressive when you consider that there was no such thing as a TV tower in Ballard County before Daddy and Buddy built theirs.

          They had already ordered their antenna from New York and it came in a kit. It was what daddy describes as a "VDX" long distance video antenna. That original aluminum antenna could receive channels 2 through 6. Later, they bought an antenna called a rhombic which was better.

          Their first objective was to get TV from St. Louis on Channel 5. They could get other channels later with the same antenna after some adjustments.

          The rhombic antenna was pointed toward St. Louis. Buddy used a transit from Japan to point it correctly.

          A rhombic antenna consists of some poles placed in a diamond pattern, with wire running from pole to pole. I remember the antenna as taking up much of the field behind the house and the tower. I think it was the key to getting signal from St. Louis.

          Mounting the regular antenna onto the tower was no easy – or safe – job. They climbed the tower, daddy on one side and Buddy on the other, and they pulled it up as they climbed. (They didn't use any of the equipment that OSHA requires today for being up so high. Of course, there wasn’t an OSHA back then or – who knows – Wickliffe might never have had a TV set.)

          Mother says that she doesn't know how she could have handled watching them so she took the easy way out and didn’t watch.

          Buddy studied the weather maps and checked longitude and latitude so he could figure the best direction to point the antenna.

          The tower was finally complete, with antenna on top, so they were ready for TV.

          Their first TV was a Motorola seven-inch, black and white of course. Color TV didn’t exist back then. I remember that Fran Hughes had something to simulate color. It was a glass panel set in front of her TV screen and it had three colors, one atop the other. When you looked at the TV through that panel it gave a weak impression of color.

          They invited folks to come watch TV for the first time. They set up the seven-incher on Fran’s porch, put some chairs in place, and had an ice cream/TV party. This might have been the first tailgate party. The yard was jammed with people who had never seen TV. There were some snowy images, probably a ball game or a boxing match or a wrestling show.

          They bought a TV with a 10-inch screen later.

          The tower lasted until the big ice storm of 1953. (See photos of my sister, Jeanne, at the base of the tower, and another with daddy and Buddy Hughes in the Photo Gallery on this site.)

          After that, they were offering aluminum towers which Daddy installed himself. When I was old enough, I climbed just about every roof in Wickliffe to help him put up antennas.

          The first TV station anywhere near us was WSIL in Harrisburg, Ill., but it was a UHF station on channel 22, and the antenna didn’t work well – if at all – on UHF signal. WSIL changed to channel 3 in 1961.

          The first regular station was being built at Cape Girardeau, Mo. We made Sunday drives there to check its progress. That station – KFVS – signed on the air on October 3, 1954. The Paducah station – WPSD – began broadcasting in 1957.

          The tower and the TV and the proof that the experts were wrong were probably pretty insignificant things in the broad scheme of the world, but they were big in our small town and in our lives.

          Buddy went on to work as an engineer with the E. I. DuPont Company and later operated his own consulting firm for a number of years. He died in 2004 at age 84.

          Daddy marked his 90^th birthday on November 1 of 2007. 

As Shakespeare Said, TV or Not TV

          There’s a story on this site about how my dad and Buddy Hughes brought TV to Ballard County in the form of flickering, ghostly images on a seven-inch screen.

          But it took several years and lots of hard work before TV was in most of the houses in Wickliffe and around the county.

          I know because I helped to carry TVs into and out of houses and to install TV towers and antennas on most of the houses in Wickliffe.

          My association with the TV business is a good example of how specific talents and skills don’t necessarily pass from parent to child.

          My dad – J.D. Culver – is one of the best you’ll ever see when it comes to making or fixing electronic things.

          When he was a child, he looked up to his brother Johnny – actual name John Percy – who was several years older. Johnny went into the radio business, eventually settling in Jonesboro, Ark., where he had his own store for many years.

          Daddy followed in Johnny’s footsteps, building crystal sets when he was real young. He opened a radio repair business in Wickliffe when he was 13 years old.

          Later, as recounted in the story on this site, he and Buddy were responsible for bringing TV into the area, and daddy sold and repaired TVs, often going to people’s homes at night to work on them.

          He also worked as a TV repairman for several years at Bob Deckard’s store in Cairo, Ill. He worked days for Bob, and ran his own repair business at night from our house.

          When I was too little to help carry sets or help put up antennas, I went with him at night on his calls and watched him work on radios and TVs in the homes of the people who owned them.

          When he couldn’t fix them in the homes – and he was able to fix many of them there – he would bring them to his shop. I stood around and watched him work on them.

          When I was big enough and strong enough, I helped him carry sets from the houses and put them into the back of the 1954 Chevy station wagon, the back of which was big enough to hold even the biggest sets.

          I continued to watch him fix them. I asked questions about what he was doing.

          I learned nothing. Daddy could do almost anything. He could fix radios and TVs, he could fix plumbing, he could make things.

          I can’t repair anything. I can’t make anything. I don’t buy anything that says “assembly required” because I can’t assemble; I always get some pieces on backwards or upside down or not on at all.

          I can write a little and that’s about my only talent except for spreading BS. Or maybe those are the same thing.

          Thank goodness the generation-skipping fixit gene landed on my sons. If anything needs to be put together or taken apart, I get one of them to do it.

          Back in the days when I was an eager observer – an observer who didn’t soak up anything he observed – TVs grew bigger and heavier.

          Some of the console models made of oak and other woods weighed about as much as a piano. I couldn’t fix them but I was strong enough to help carry them. Many a set did daddy and I lug from a house and put it into the back of that ’54 Chevy.

          The evolution of TVs and other electronics is an amazing thing.

          My Fisher TV, which was part of a system that included video, tape player, turntable, radio, amplifier, etc. gave up the ghost earlier this years after about 20 years of service.

          I had been eyeing those flat-panel TVs for some time and decided to invest in a big-screen model.

          I purchased a 40-inch LCD set. That’s huge! The big screens back when I bought the Fisher system were maybe 26 or 27 inches. I worried if I would be able to carry the new one inside the house when I got home.

          Turns out you can just about pick it up with one hand. It’s like there’s nothing there.

          That’s a good thing when you’re getting ready to carry it, but it seems like something that costs that much and has that much viewing area ought to weigh more.

          I feel cheated that it’s not heavy like the good ol’ sets of days gone by. The good ol’ sets daddy and I put into the back of that ’54 Chevy.

          I’ve felt that way before when I purchase something that comes in a fairly large box and gives the impression that it will be very substantial. But when you pick it up, it’s like the box is empty.

          Can anything that weightless actually work and continue to work like the stuff they used to make out of oak and steel and thick glass?

          I guess it can. I guess it’s progress. But sometimes I miss the old days when things weighed more and probably didn’t work as well.

A whole lotta scratchin’ going on

          A summer ritual for many kids who grew up in the country was picking blackberries, frequently for a grandparent or a parent, or sometimes to sell to other people.

          If the berries were for kinfolks, a bucketful probably earned the picker at least a quarter, which was not bad money at the time.

          But like most jobs it had its downfalls and some of them were mitey unpleasant.

          My family owned about 15 acres outside of Wickliffe.

          It was a much bigger farm during the heyday of my great-grandfather Jones, but the family gradually sold off pieces to help cope with the Depression.

          My great-grandfather, according to my father, was quite the farmer. He raised a variety of vegetables, some of which the family ate, some of which he sold.

          When I was a young man living there, we didn’t do any farming other than planting some peas in the field or growing a garden.

          On the flat top of a small hill on the edge of the property adjoining the Horn farm, there was a field bordered by a fence row with lots of blackberry bushes.

          Near one end of the field there was a hickory tree which attracted squirrels when the nuts were ready to eat. I did my first squirrel hunting at that tree with a .410 borrowed from my cousin George.

          Hunting aside, my most frequent reason for being there was the blackberries.

          My grandmother, Edna Jones Culver, would send me to pick her a bucket of berries, and my mother also wanted some during berry season.

          Both of them could convert the berries into cobblers or jams or jellies, and few treats are better than a good cobbler or a jar of jam made from freshly picked blackberries.

          There were two hazards that went along with blackberry picking. One of them was the briars that grew on the vines. A bucket of blackberries went hand-in-hand (or wrist-in-briar) with a scratched-up forearm.

          But those weren’t the worst scratches. Nope, not by a long shot.

          If you’ve picked berries, you know what I’m talking about.

          Along about blackberry season, you could tell who had been picking. They were the ones constantly scratching their crotches.

          I don’t know if chiggers hang out on the berry vines or if they just lurk on the grass that a picker has to walk through to get to the vines.

          Wherever their origin, chiggers and blackberries go together like biscuits and gravy.

          We didn’t have a good bug repellent back then. It was a matter of “picker beware.”

          Chiggers look for tight spaces, like at the tops of your socks or inside your underwear.

          It’s hard to believe how anything that small can itch that bad.

          Near the end of my blackberry picking days I figured out a way to avoid the scratches. I put a nail into the sawed-off end of a broom handle and bent the nail into a hook.

          I could use the hook to reach into the thickest growth, grab a vine, and pull it toward me. That made it possible to avoid the briar scratches but I never discovered how to avoid the chigger scratching.

          Actually, I did find a way. Pod had some grapes and blackberries growing near her house in Monkey’s Eyebrow. She kept the grass mowed and the vines didn’t have briars.

          You could pick and eat to your stomach’s content and not get either kind of scratch.

          But you know, I think maybe they tasted a little better when I had to endure pain and suffering to get them.

 A Memorable Christmas Dinner

          With Thanksgiving a couple of days behind us and the shopping frenzy well under way as Christmas approaches, I was thinking this morning of one of my most memorable Christmas meals – hamburgers.

          This goes back probably to sometime in the 1980s when I was living in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. My son Joe Ray was living with me at the time.

          Our family usually gathered at my parents’ home on Christmas day to enjoy the annual Christmas feast my mother prepared, with the help of my sisters Jeanne and Julie.

          This particular year I decided to do something different, even though it didn’t set well with mother who expected that all of her children should gather at her house on Christmas and gorge themselves on her great food.

          And it was great, make no mistake about it. Mother and her sister Pod, who often hosted large family gatherings at her home in Monkey’s Eyebrow, were two of the best cooks I ever had the gastronomical pleasure of knowing.

          Mother still is, even though she claims that age and failing eyesight combine to diminish her talents. Even diminished, however, she remains a great cook.

          Joe Ray and I had discussed Christmas plans and we decided to break with tradition and do our own thing.

          About an hour’s drive from Oak Ridge, near Spring City in Rhea County, up Shut-In Gap Road, and a couple of miles down a gravel road at the top of the hill in Grandview is the Piney Falls natural area. (You can check it out at this link: http://www.state.tn.us/environment/na/natareas/piney/ )

          The Piney Falls area was one of my favorite places to go. Even though it’s open to the public, it’s rare that you run into anyone else.

          I used to camp there when Jesse, Jubal and Jolie were little, and we would hike along the trail beside the cliff, winding up at the falls which tumble about 80 feet.

          We would build campfires at night and roast wieners and marshmallows and tell scary stories.

          Sometimes late in the year, we would wake up in the morning to find snow on the ground and covering our tent.

          Joe Ray and I decided we would go to Piney Falls on Christmas day that year and cook hamburgers.

          Everyone thought we were “touched” (some people call it “tetched”), a little bit crazy or even more than a little bit but we had made up our minds. We stuck to the plan even though the Christmas season that year, and especially in the Cumberland Mountains where Piney Falls is located, was bitterly cold.

          We drove there mid-day Christmas, taking with us the makings of hamburgers and a large cast-iron skillet in which to cook them.

          We gathered firewood at the site, picking up branches from fallen trees, and eventually got a fire going. I think Joe Ray helped it along with some bar oil from a chain saw.

          We fried the burgers in that cast iron skillet over the wood fire, and they became about the finest Christmas meal we ever had. (Check out the story farther down this column of another fantastic meal during a duck hunt – a baloney sandwich.)

          We walked around the area after we ate. At the top of Piney Falls was a fantastic sight. It was so cold that the water had frozen from the top of the hill all 80 feet to the pool at the bottom. What an amazing winter wonderland it was!

          We ate and shivered and admired views while the rest of the family stuffed on ham and turkey and vegetables and desserts in the warmth of my parents’ home. To this day, I think ours was the better Christmas dinner.

How to become a sourdough chef, at least for a little while

There for a while I was one of the great sourdough chefs, but it didn’t last for long.

My mother probably wishes it never even started.

Anyway, who would have thought that a little bit of sourdough could blow up a jar.

I blame it on Sports Afield. It was my favorite magazine back then when I was in high school. It featured the great fishing writer Jason Lucas. He had a photo spread one time showing how to fly fish. I followed his instructions and had many a happy morning across the road at Bob Baggett’s pond before the school bus came.

One issue of the magazine had instructions for making sourdough and recipes for cooking with it.

Your mouth would water reading instructions for making sourdough biscuits, pancakes, bread, and probably some other things. Those are the ones I remember.

It was pretty simple to get started. You took a little flour, a packet of yeast and some water. It had to age for a couple of days before it became sourdough.

I don’t remember if it gave instructions about how to store it, but I relied on the old faithful Mason jar, the kind people use to can vegetables.

Almost before the saliva had a chance to stop flowing from reading the article, I was ready to cook.

I started with biscuits. And they were mighty fine biscuits, even if they were no thicker than a silver dollar. I guess sourdough biscuits don’t rise the way regular buttermilk biscuits do.

Those being a tasty success, even if not thick enough to split open for some butter – but hey, you could put the butter on top! – I graduated to pancakes.

If the biscuits were good, the pancakes were better.

The whole family was happy that I had become one of the great sourdough chefs.

But there was this one hot summer day when all of us were gone for some reason. When we came home, mother – who still has one of the great noses of all time, a sense of smell that surpasses even the greatest bloodhound – sniffed and said something like, “What’s that smell?”

It took a while to locate it but the smell was coming from the top of the metal kitchen cabinet where I had stored my sourdough with the lid screwed down tight.

Again, who would have thought a little sourdough would blow up a jar?

But that’s what had happened.

I suppose the yeast working down there in the flour and water generates some gas. With the lid screwed on tight, there was no place for the gas to go so the jar exploded.

I can’t remember the words mother used, but I think they went beyond her initial, “What’s that smell?”

And that was the end of my budding career as a sourdough chef.

I think the end was accompanied by warnings of bodily harm that would be inflicted on me if I even thought about sourdough again.

Some time later – probably time measured in years – when my parents replaced the cabinet, the sourdough was still there on the back of it where it had run down and created an awful mess.

But it really wasn’t my fault. It wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for Sports Afield.

 Making wine spodeeodee 

(Note: This article was written by my sister Jeanne, second of the six children of my parents. I guess that makes me the oldest. She made me promise not to change any of what she claims to be facts, but we all know that her memory isn’t nearly as good as mine, and I probably remember this a little differently, if at all. But here it is.) 

By Jeanne Thorpe

When Joe was going through his "Chef Joeyardi" food and drink phase, he not only thought that he could make bread and biscuits out of sourdough starter, he attempted to make wine, too. (Joe also had an Edgar Allan Joe and a Joe Dwayne (Eddy) phase – Joe’s middle name is Wayne – but those are stories for another time.)

We lived outside of Wickliffe, Ballard County, Ky., about a mile from town on the property that once belonged to our ancestors, Tackett and Jones.

Around the property, there were many blackberry vines that our great grandfather Walter Henry Jones had planted. He was a farmer who grew many crops. Located just east of Grandpa's house were two very large mulberry trees. We could always tell when the mulberry fruit was ripe because the birds loved to eat them and leave us purple deposits all over everything.

One summer, when we had an especially good crop of mulberry fruit, Joe decided that he would attempt to make wine. He researched how to do this but I'm not sure where he found his information. It's possible that he asked people. All we had in the form of reference books were the World Book Encyclopedia and the library at school.

This was during the late 1950s so we didn't have the Internet where one can research anything from how to make bombs to directions to anywhere.

He managed to fight off the birds long enough to pick what he decided was the right amount of mulberries.

He worked on the wine for some time and did make a pretty good quantity until one day we noticed that the kitchen sink was purple. Our mother, Jessie Crice Culver, had poured the wine down the sink. The sink was made of porcelain and remained purple for a long time.

I didn't actually know why mother poured the wine down the sink until today. She told me that Joe was tasting the wine a little too much and she decided that the best thing she could do for Joe was to take the temptation away.

Think about how much of a mess the kitchen was: sourdough starter behind the cabinets (the smell was present for a long time) and a purple sink. Joe will tell about the sourdough in another story that he’ll probably post later this week.

If there’s one thing Joe can do well, it’s make a mess.

By the way, I love my brother very much and that is why I remember all that I remember no matter what he says.

What do you name a damp red pig?

          I’ve had several Doberman pinschers. Only one fit the image most people have of a Doberman. Thor was flat out mean.

          My first Doberman, Tonga the Avenger, was a sissy.

          A couple of Dobermans I bought from the Kimbertal kennel in Pennsylvania were very big dogs, but also were very gentle. One of them, Dracula, would even move aside and share his food bowl with a cat.

          But Thor was … well, Thor was Thor.

          I was living in a house my then-wife Judy and I built on the old home place outside of Wickliffe and I was working at the Cairo Evening Citizen as managing editor.

          Bill Bowers was police chief of Cairo at the time. Bill and I knew each other from a few years earlier when we both worked as tour guides at the Ancient Buried City, now known as the Wickliffe Mounds.

          Western Baptist Hospital in Paducah owned the Ancient Buried City at that time and George Johnson was the long-time manager of the site, an excavation of a village site of the Mississippian mound builders.

          I had gone to the Cairo police station, which then was located in the granite-walled Customs House, that day, as I did every day, to collect police reports.

          Bill approached me and asked if I would like to have his Doberman, officially named Thor’s Thunder.

          I forget the reason he wanted to give him to me. It may have been that Bill and his wife had just had a child and the dog was too large and aggressive. I agreed to take him.

          I had a fairly large dog pen behind my house. It was built of six-foot high welded wire. It was divided into two sides by a panel of the wire.

          One side was Thor’s.

          Thor got along with me okay. He would walk in the “heel” position on the leash, sit and stay on command.

          But you couldn’t correct Thor by swatting him on the butt with the leash. If you did, his eyes grew steely cold and a low rumble echoed from deep within his chest, a rumble that implied, “Touch me again and you’ll lose that arm.”

          He didn’t tolerate strangers or most critters.

          One day I heard Thor in a fit of mad. When I went outside to check what was happening, Thor was biting at the wire and lunging against it. He was having a fit as a tiny box turtle turtled its way near the pen.

          It didn’t take a lot to set Thor off.

          At that same time I was in my pig phase.

          I had built a pig pen just inside the woods and populated it with occasional purchases, usually of recently weaned pigs.

          One day someone sold me a small red pig, weighing probably around 10 pounds.

          I always named my pigs. I had Big Mama, a sow with eight little piglets; Racehorse, the escape artist who managed to get out of the pen and take off running (motorists sometimes had an amazed look on their faces when they saw me running beside the road, waving a large fish net as I chased Racehorse); Possum, the pig who didn’t really look like a pig.

          When I came home with the little red pig, it was late in the day and I didn’t want to carry it to the pig pen, so I put it in the dog pen on the opposite side from Thor.

          I hung around for a while to make sure Thor didn’t rip a hole in the wire between the two sides, but he didn’t even seem to be angry.

          In fact, what he did was run back and forth along the dividing wire, stopping every few runs. When he stopped, he raised his leg and peed on the little red pig.

          It didn’t seem to matter where the pig was. Thor was an accurate urinater. He hit the pig every time.

          The pig didn’t seem to mind.

          Next morning I took the dampened pig out of the dog pen and relocated him to the pig pen.

          He had earned his new name: Fireplug.

The Battle for the Purse of Many Colors

By Jeanne Culver Thorpe

When I was a little girl, my cousin Jackie and I fought over a purse that belonged to our Aunt Thelma (Thelma Crice Davis). (See related photo in the Photo Gallery.) I don't remember how old I was but it had to be before 1949 because that is when our Grandfather Robert Frederick Crice died.

We both wanted to be the one to hold that purse. Partly that’s because the purse was pretty, but also it’s because it belonged to Thelma.

According to Jackie, “I remember the purse. It was made of spiral pieces of something, probably plastic. The colors were beautiful to a pre-schooler. There was bright blue, yellow, red and green I think.

“It must have held cosmetics or something because I remember holding it up to my nose and I can still remember the smell to this day. I liked the texture too. I liked the way it felt when you ran your hand over the beading on the purse. I guess I thought it to be the most beautiful object I had ever seen.

“I remember I wanted to hold it, keep it and I considered it to be some kind of prized object. Besides all that, it belonged to my Aunt Thelma who I thought was so special. She was so kind to me and would always try to guide me in etiquette and the proper way to behave. Part of the reason I wanted it I think is because it belonged to her.”

Well, I wanted the purse, too, so, the battle was on!

I remember one time that I was especially angry about not being able to hold it. I think that was the time that I ran Jackie into the side of the porch and cut her head. I guess in my mind, I thought that if I did something to make her have to go into the house, I would get the purse. All I remember about that now is that my behind burned for a long time. Our grandmother – all 90 pounds of her – could bring a behind to a major burn!

Jackie was correct, our Aunt Thelma was kind and generous to a fault.  I wonder what happened to that purse?

I was in a department store a few years ago and saw a plastic purse with pretty colors. I had to pick it up and look at it and remember Aunt Thelma. Somehow, it just didn't smell like hers.

Walking to School in Wickliffe

 By Jeanne Culver Thorpe

(Note: Jeanne is the second of the six of the children of our parents. She lives in Knoxville, Tenn. She wrote this article about pleasant memories of walking to school in Wickliffe. Her memory is much better than mine. I don’t remember this at all.)

I was in my yard yesterday and noticed the kids getting off the bus and remembered when we use to walk to school in Wickliffe.

When I was in the first grade at Wickliffe Elementary School, my brother Joe and I used to walk to school.

Today kids seem to either ride the bus or get picked up by a parent or day care facility. I guess another reason they don’t walk to school is that, especially in my neighborhood, the school is across a busy highway and even though it's in the city, there are no sidewalks – only streets. But, I digress.

We lived in Wickliffe in a little house behind the Frances Hughes house. Our parents rented from her. The house we lived in was built by her nephew, David (Buddy) Hughes. (Note from Joe: Daddy and Buddy Hughes built a wooden TV tower in the yard and proved the TV experts wrong. I’ll write about that in another story.)

Our mother, Jessie Crice Culver, would get us ready for school every morning and we would leave and sometimes walk by Barry Rollins' house and he would join the walk.

Then we would proceed down the road by Barry's house and stop at Mrs. Garrett’s. Our cousin, George Crice, would sometimes be there and he would walk with us.

We crossed a busy highway – U.S. 62 – and proceeded by the Christian Church and Wickliffe Baptist Church and then turned left by the Methodist Church.

Then we would stop and wait for our cousin Jackie Anderson who was living at the Ballard County Jail with our grandmother, Lannie Johnston Crice. (Grandmother was the jailer and the jail was in the house.)

Then we walked down the hill and crossed another Wickliffe street. We would pass Miss Maude’s store on the right (I think there is a city park there now) and then turn left at the next street to walk on to school.

The last street that we walked on would take us by Gary Adams’ house and other people that we knew. When we got to the last street, there would be many more people walking in the same direction.

What was so interesting about the street is that it had a sidewalk in the middle of the street and it led straight to the school. The old school in Wickliffe had a huge bell at the top and it would ring as we approached.

Soon after that our dad, J. D. Culver, finished building the house that we lived in about a mile from Wickliffe and we started riding the bus to school. We had the same bus driver, Bernice Hargrove, until we moved to Tennessee about 10 years later.

I have good memories of walking to school through Wickliffe with my brother, cousins and friends.

Good thing the alphabet didn’t stop at I

            Ever since Edward Culver (or Collver) the Puritan paddled over from England in 1635 to help found the colony of Dedham, Massachusetts, in 1636 and to establish – along with his wife, Anne Ellis, whom he married in 1638 – the Culver line in the United States, the letter J is the first letter in Culver names with an inordinate frequency.

          There are lots of Johns, for instance, in the generations that follow the first Culver in the colonies.

          My grandfather Culver was one of the John Culvers. He and my grandmother, Edna Jones Culver, had two sons, John and Joe D. (who is my father).

          Daddy married Jessie Lee Crice. Over a span of several years they produced six children, who, starting with me, are named Joe, Jeanne, Jerry, Jeff, Julie and Janie.

          Not being one to let traditions end, my seven children are named, in order of birth, Jennifer, Jody, Joe, Jade, Jesse, Jubal and Jolie.

          I’m not the only Culver to produce children by more than one wife. One difference is that the Culver men of long ago usually married another woman after the first wife died. In keeping with the custom of the times, sometimes the second wife was the first wife’s sister.

          None of my several wives died. But the marriages did.

          More than one person has asked me about being married several times. I usually say that I’ve been blessed to have been married to sensitive, caring women who came to realize that I deserved better, so they decided to give me a chance to get what I deserved.

          But that sounds like a putdown of the ex-wives and I don’t intend to say anything bad about any of them. Let’s just say that I’m not the easiest person to live with. Hey! Sometimes I even want to run away from myself.

          My first child, Jennifer, died several years ago of a brain tumor. Jody and Joe Ray live in Kentucky. Jade and her husband live in South Carolina. Jolie lives in Tennessee and Jesse and Jubal live in West Virginia.

          One interesting note about the last three kids, who are known in some circles as the “Duck kids.” That’s because of their middle names: Jesse Mallard, Jubal Drake and Jolie Teal.

          Don’t ask me why. I’ve loved ducks ever since I became a duck hunter in my teens. I like watching them fly, hearing them quack, seeing them in wildlife art. Their mother was a tolerant woman who went along with the duck middle names.

          And the kids don’t seem to hate me for naming them after ducks.

 Memories and I-Wish-I-Could-Have-Seen-Its

          It was either at the last Wickliffe reunion or the one two years earlier when I had a profound insight. I remember the occasion because insights – profound or shallow – are rare and, therefore, memorable.

          It was at the end of the program part of the reunion that I ran into Steve Sullivan I didn’t recognize him. He was older than I by a few years, and he left town right after he graduated from Ballard. I don’t think I had seen him in probably 45 years or more.

         Steve said that after he left, he returned "only to watch you play basketball." He also mentioned my jump shot.

          I suspect he was putting me on. I can’t imagine anyone coming back to town just to watch me play basketball. But I have to admit, it made me feel pretty good that he said it, true or not.

          Thinking about what he said is when I had that insight.

          Over the years when I was working as a newspaper reporter and columnist and editor and whatever-needed-doing, I started out as a sports writer. I covered sports at the Cairo Evening Citizen, the Paducah Sun-Democrat (in the days before they dropped the Democrat but did not add the word “Republican,” which is what they had become) the Lexington (Ky.) Leader and on weekends the Lexington Herald-Leader (that was back when Adolph Rupp was still coaching at the University of Kentucky), and The Oak Ridger in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

          I got to watch at least hundreds of basketball players (football, too, but we’re talking about basketball today) and witness their grace, their skills and their flaws.

         Of all the players on all the teams when I was inside basketball gyms, the only player I never saw play was me!

          Oh sure, I've created mental pictures of myself playing basketball. I can conjure up the high, graceful leap. The classic form of a jump shot with a flick of the wrist at the peak of the jump. The masterful dribble. The behind-the-back pass. Even the now-extinct occasional two-handed set shot rising and dropping, forming a perfect arch just before it barely ripples the net without touching the rim.

          But none of that might be accurate.

          That was before everyone had a video camera or a camcorder. It was before every person young or old had a cell phone they could use to record video or talk nonstop about matters that deserved no discussion, certainly not hours of it, and certainly not highly personal conversations spoken in voices loud enough to offend everyone within a 25-foot radius.

          It was back in the days when, if a friend said “Call my cell,” that meant he was in jail. Jail was the only place with a cell back then.

          It was back when it hadn’t been very long since we first acquired “modern” telephones in Ballard County. In fact, I can remember the local telephone company – Roscoe Patterson ran it and maybe later Odie Bailey did – with hand cranks and party lines where seven other subscribers could listen to your phone calls and at least one person always did listen, and when the call was for your phone you knew by the sequence of long and short rings.

          Film cameras did exist, I don’t think anyone ever filmed any part of any of our games.

          I was motivated by the love of playing basketball. It was fun to win, but the real fun was in playing the game as well as I could. I really loved basketball. I tried to feel sad when we lost but I couldn't because I had gotten to play!

          Thinking back, I remember that there was some problem my senior year when it was time for the annual basketball banquet. I overheard Coach Jim Frank and Principal Robert Fiser discussing that the person who was going to serve as emcee couldn’t make it and they didn’t know who they could get.

          Naturally, I walked up to them and told them I would do it.

          They must have been desperate because eventually they let me.

          I remember telling a few jokes to start my emceeing duties.

          I also remember that when it was Coach Frank’s turn to talk, he said, “Joe came to me one time and said, ‘Coach, I had a dream that I was playing basketball.’ I told him ‘That wasn’t a dream. Get back in the game!’ ” Or something like that.

          I suspect he told the same joke about someone on every team he coached, but I know it made me feel proud to be the one singled out that year.

          Oh for a collection of videos of Ballard games from those days.

          I mentioned my insight to Tommy Ryan in an e-mail. Tommy, who has contributed several stories and ideas to this site, wrote back, “You had a picture perfect jump shot and ‘best I saw’ ball handling skills of any BMHS player that I watched in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Unfortunately you were a too short, too slow guy to get major college offers, though I bet you could have gotten a small school offer if your coaches (or you) had desired.”

          Tommy went on about his own athletic past:

          “My baseball swing was shown in a picture in the BMHS annual supplement my senior season ... looked ugly as I remember the late swing I took on that pitch. I hit real well in high school but had a below average arm. My coach, Conley Marcum, asked me if I was interested in playing at a small school, but I told him dad had said it was Murray State for me. Case closed. It worked for the best as I now REALLY realize how tough it was for dad to work those long days at the service station until age 62. I helped him literally every weekend during my four years of college as Dan had done before me. Hey, if I had gone off to Podunk College to play baseball, I might have missed that "educational" Club 18 experience. Honestly, I learned a lot about staying calm in dealing with people during those summers at Wickliffe.”